Happy new year from your friends at Soundslice! We’re starting the year off with a bunch of improvements:

Synth playback honors dynamics

This was one of our most-requested features. Our synthetic playback will now honor dynamic markings and hairpins (crescendos and decrescendos). That is, the playback’s volume will increase or decrease depending on the notation.

Increased multitrack stem limit

We now support up to 16 multitrack stems per recording! Previously the limit was four.

We’ve also made a small usability fix: when you upload a new stem, we’ll now use the filename as the stem name. Previously new stems were always called “Track,” which could be cumbersome to deal with.

Hairpin detection in PDF/image scans

Our music-scanning feature now detects hairpins, aka crescendos and decrescendos. This pairs nicely with our new synth support for playing those back (see above).

As a reminder, we have a comprehensive page detailing which notations our PDF/image scanner supports. We’re continuing to work hard on expanding this.

New “instrument assignment” tool for PDF/image scans

The PDF/image scanner now has an “instrument assignment” tool. This gives you a way to assign staves to instruments, rename instruments and set instrument transpositions.

You can use this, for example, for orchestral scores in which each system has a different configuration of instruments. Or in a poor-quality image in which we didn’t assign instruments correctly.

Read more in the new help page.

New channel post design

Channel posts have been slightly redesigned: we’ve moved the sidebar from the left to the right. We’ve also made it work more intuitively on small screens — the slice details are more obvious, and it’s easier to show/hide them.

Assorted little stuff

• Our metronome now does the right thing for compound time signatures — ticking on dotted quarters, for example.
• In chord-chart view, we now hide part names. Part names were interfering with the special positioning that chord-only view uses.
• When importing a Guitar Pro file, we’ll now honor the decision to hide chord diagrams, if that’s in the GP file. Previously we always showed chord diagrams upon import.
• Also regarding Guitar Pro: we now honor GP 8’s piano fingering feature, plus the left fingering preference (“p” versus “t”).
• Our MusicXML exporter is better: If you’re exporting a slice with chord names, we’ll now encode that data in a way that’s more compatible with other programs.