Our player just got a big new feature, something we’re calling clips.

It’s a way to save specific subsections of music for quick and easy access — essentially bookmarking “a slice of a slice.” It improves upon our previous saved loops feature, making it much more general, shareable and useful.

If you use Soundslice for teaching, this is a great way to guide your students toward particular sections of a piece and provide a crystal-clear and easy path toward practicing the right thing.

If you use Soundslice for learning and practicing on your own, this is a great way to organize what you’re currently working on, at a very granular level.

How it works

If you’re logged in and have a paid plan, you’ll now see a Clips button at the bottom of any slice you can access. If the slice doesn’t have any clips yet, it’ll look like this:

Click “Add a clip,” and a panel will appear at the right side of your screen. Tweak the start and end bar numbers to specify the range of music (the music will be redrawn on the fly to give you instant feedback):

Aside from specifying the bar range, you can set a few more things:

Here we have:

• Notes — optional text that’ll be displayed at the top of the screen when your clip is active. For example, teachers could use this to provide practice instructions for this particular section of music.
• Set recording? — if you check this box, then the player will automatically switch to the given recording when the clip is active. Useful for slices with multiple recordings.
• Make this public? — if you check this box, then anybody viewing your slice will have access to this clip. You’ll only see this option for slices you’ve created yourself; it’s not possible to add public clips to other people’s slices.

Hit Save, and your clip is immediately available to use.

Once a slice has clips, they’re accessible very quickly via the Clips button:

You can save clips on any slice sitewide; these clips remain private to you. You can also add public clips on any slice you’ve created, and anybody viewing your slice will be able to use them.

For more on clips, see our new help page.

Farewell, saved loops

This totally replaces our old saved loops feature. Here’s how clips are bigger and better:

• Saved loops were only usable in context of a practice list (something which often caused confused emails from customers!). Clips are available on any slice; you don’t have to be in a practice list.
• Saved loops couldn’t be shared. Clips can be either public or private, opening the door to some nice teaching approaches.
• Saved loops weren’t available in embeds, but clips work seamlessly in embeds (nice!).

All existing saved loops have been converted to private clips.

Notes for embeds

If one of your slices has public clips, and you embed that slice, then those will be available in the embed. Anybody viewing your embed will be able to use the clips interface to select the clips you’ve added.

Please note that our embed treats clips as read-only. In other words, people viewing your slice via an embed cannot directly add their own clips to the slice. The only way to add clips to a slice is via soundslice.com directly (not via embeds).

More to come

We’ve got a bunch of ideas for expanding the clips feature. One thing we’d like to do is provide the option to save a specific notation layout with a clip (for example, soloing a certain instrument, or entering lyrics-only view). If you have more ideas, please let us know!