Automatic backups in our editor

When you’re creating or editing music via our notation editor, we now automatically back up your latest unsaved edits. The data is stored directly in your web browser and is meant to be a safeguard in case of accidents: inadvertently closing your browser window, your device running out of charge, etc.

If you close your browser window without saving, then later return to editing the same slice in that browser, we’ll restore your unsaved changes from the backup. To help communicate this, we’ve added a subtle count of unsaved changes directly in the editor:

Please note that this is different than the auto-save feature you’d find in websites like Google Docs. We haven’t implemented auto-save in our editor because we want the act of saving (and hence publishing your slice, whether to students or to your channel or in your embeds) to be a deliberate action.

In the future, we might add an option to auto-save as an opt-in thing. For now, we’re hoping this automatic backup feature strikes a nice balance between protecting you from accidents and giving you full control over saving/publishing.

Focus mode and clips improvements

When you’re in focus mode, you’ll now see the range of bar numbers you’re focusing on, and you can quickly change them:

This also applies to the new clips feature we launched last week. Useful if you want to “peek ahead” for a bar or further reduce the amount of visible music.

Improved auto-saved player settings

Our automatic saving of player settings has gotten smarter. We now save separate settings for small screens versus large screens.

So if you visit a slice on your phone, then customize the layout options, we’ll restore those options next time you visit the slice on a phone. But if you visit the same slice on a larger screen, you’ll have a distinct set of auto-saved settings.

This is in response to feedback we’ve heard from people: different screen sizes merit different layout options, and it was a bit awkward to apply a large screen’s auto-saved settings to the same music on a smaller screen.

Also in auto-save news, we’ve expanded the auto-saving to save the player volume.

PayPal support for our Teacher plan

You can now pay for our Teacher plan with PayPal. This is a follow-up to our previous announcement of PayPal support for our Plus plan.