Phones, tablets and laptops automatically turn off their screens after some period of inactivity. Generally that’s a good thing, because it saves battery life — but in the case of Soundslice it’s not necessarily good. It’s annoying to have your screen go blank in the middle of a practice session!

To avoid that annoyance, we now prevent your device from going to sleep during Soundslice playback. As long as Soundslice is playing audio or video, your screen won’t automatically sleep.

You don’t have to install anything or set a preference for this to work; it’s all automatic. This uses a relatively new technology, and most modern web browsers support it. Notable exceptions: iOS didn’t add support until version 16.4, and Firefox still doesn’t support it as of this writing.

Whenever audio/video playback stops, your device will go back to its usual settings — meaning the screen is free to go to sleep again. So for those of you who use Soundslice mostly for reading music (and not playing it back), you’re still at risk of the screen going to sleep. With that in mind, we might expand this to provide an explicit “Prevent the screen from sleeping” setting, which you’d have to opt into. If you’re interested in that, please let us know by leaving a comment.