It’s been a while since we posted a proper product update! Here’s how Soundslice has improved in the last two months, grouped by category.

Editor improvements

We’ve put a lot of work into our notation editor:

The new Split track by voices command lets you split a multi-voice instrument into multiple instruments. Super handy for vocal music in which multiple parts are written on a single staff. Now you can split those into multiple instruments, so that you can solo/mute them individually. Read more here.

The new Move note up/down chromatically command moves the selected note up or down, using sharps when moving upward and flats when moving downward. It’s available via editor search; feel free to assign a custom keyboard shortcut.

It’s now possible to create tuplets via an explicit selection of notes/rests. Just select them, then use the tuplet command and specify the tuplet ratio. Previously, this only worked by selecting the first note or rest in the tuplet — which made certain configurations of tuplets impossible to enter.

We’ve redesigned the sidebar panels to work much more nicely on phones. Previously, these panels took up the entire screen; now they use a smaller amount of space at the bottom:

We’ve fixed a longstanding annoyance when deleting notes in multivoice music. When deleting the last note or rest in a voice, if the previous bar didn’t have any music in that voice, you’d be taken to the very first bar — annoying and disorienting. We now keep you in the same bar.

You can now enter line breaks within inner/outer text. Our graphics engine now supports them, and our editor lets you add them. Just hit Enter when inputting text.

We’ve added support for 8va treble clefs when adding or changing clefs. Previously these were only possible via importing them from MusicXML or PDF.

The undo function now works more intuitively. If you open a slice in our editor, make a change and then undo, the “Unsaved changes” count at the bottom of the screen will go back to zero. And the Save button will be grayed-out to communicate that there aren’t any unsaved changes (because you undid them). Previously, the system wasn’t sophisticated enough to know about undo — it just always thought you had unsaved changes.

And finally, the largest editor improvement — which took several months of development — is one that’s totally invisible. You can’t see the change, but perhaps you can feel it:

We’ve changed the undo system to be much more efficient. Previously, every time you made an edit (no matter how small), we would freeze the entire document (no matter how large) and save that in the undo history. Now, we only save the “operation” that was taken — which is a significantly smaller amount of data. The upshot is that our editor now uses a lot less memory and is much more responsive, especially with larger pieces of music.

General site improvements

Creating slices with video? You can now upload a custom thumbnail image. Our player will display your thumbnail when the slice loads. More info here.

Our features page has a nice new design and lots of new content. If you’re ever thinking of telling musician friends about Soundslice, this is a good page to send them.

And a small but useful improvement: it’s now possible to export PDFs directly from the slice manager, instead of needing to go into our editor.

Player improvements

Our metronome is now more exact. We rewrote it from the ground up to use more bulletproof timing when used with synthetic playback, MP3 playback and non-YouTube videos. (For YouTube, it’s a bit trickier and is still on our to-do list.)

The new metronome also solves some longstanding bugs, such as the lack of a metronome click at the very start of a loop (if a loop is active).

For videos: we handle buffering better now. Specifically, our playhead will stop moving during buffering, so as not to be misleading.

Relatedly, we improved our approach to video seeking. Previously, if you had a loop active, we wouldn’t seek to the start of the loop until you started playback. Now, if you have a loop active, we’ll seek to the start as soon as the loop is created — meaning the video will be in the exact right spot as soon as you hit play (not needing to buffer or seek). A small detail, but every bit helps.

Speaking of playback, we improved our synthetic playback engine to avoid overlapped notes. Previously there was a tiny bit of overlap between the decay of a note and the onset of the subsequent note. This has been cleaned up, and things sound more precise now.

On iOS, we were finally able to (somewhat?) fix a longstanding annoyance where you hit Play but don’t hear any audio (described here). If you’re on the latest version of iOS, chances are this problem is now solved, thanks to Apple finally providing a workaround.

Music notation improvements

Focus mode now uses consistent bar numbering. If you enter focus mode, the displayed bar numbers within notation will match the bar numbers in the full (non-focus) music. Previously, bar numbers were reset within focus mode.

The “Show pitch names” feature is now available for all paying users on any slice. If you’re in a paid plan, you’ll be able to toggle on pitch name display in the Appearance settings for any slice sitewide. Great for beginners. (Previously this was only available on a slice if the slice’s creator manually turned it on.)

Our transposition feature is now consistent between chord names and notation. When transposing, previously we used a slightly different approach for chord names versus the notation — meaning the same pitch might result in two different spellings. Chords and notation now use the same transposition logic.

Music scanning improvements

And finally, improvements to our PDF/image scanner:

It now supports importing two-bar similes. This notation is especially common in percussion music.

Multivoice music is handled much better. Previously we would sometimes create unnecessary hidden rests and unnecessary extra voices; those situations should be much less frequent now.

Support for single-line staff music is better. Previously we only detected these staves if they began with a percussion clef; now that clef is no longer required.

Our machine-learning models continue to improve on a regular basis, meaning the detection gets more accurate and you get fewer review questions.

The display of the original uploaded image is now horizontally centered — which feels a lot nicer than the previous left-aligned design.

Thanks

We’ve also made dozens of bug fixes and small usability tweaks — way too many to list here. Usually these are in direct response to folks contacting us. A big thanks to everybody who’s made suggestions and bug reports, as always!