Here’s what’s new on Soundslice this week:

New “Pitch names” options

Our automatic pitch names feature now supports German-style pitch names (with an “H” instead of “B”) and solfège (fixed do).

When activating pitch names, you now select your preferred pitch name style:

For more info on the two new styles, including examples, see the updated help page.

Tempo marking detection in music scans

Our PDF/image scanning feature now detects tempo markings, aka metronome markings.

Previously, our scanner always used “quarter note = 120 BPM” in its results — so you had to change that via our editor. Now, we should detect the tempo if it’s printed in the music.

Tempo markings are detected anywhere in your music, not just at the beginning. And, of course, if your scanned music doesn’t contain any tempo markings, it’s easy to add them with our editor.

Editor always displays tempo markings

In other tempo-marking news, we’ve changed our editor to always display them, even if they’ve been marked as hidden. Since every slice has a default (hidden) tempo marking, this means you’ll now always see a tempo marking at the very first bar:

It’s colored in light gray to communicate that it’s technically “hidden.” If you switch to View mode, you won’t see any hidden tempo markings.

We made this change to clear up confusion about a slice’s default tempo, and to make it easier to see stray tempo markings that might have been imported from MusicXML files.

New sharing settings

For those of you sharing slices with students/bandmates/whoever: we’ve reorganized the way sharing settings work, and we’ve added some new abilities.

Previously, there was a single “Slice details” screen in our editor. This contained the basic slice info (name, artist, description), plus a second tab with default visibility options.

Now, we’ve split that into two separate areas of our editor:

• The “Slice details” screen has the basic info (name, artist, description). Get to this either by clicking the slice name at upper left, or by clicking “Edit slice details” in the “...” menu at the top. More info here.
• The “Settings for others” screen lets you specify how the slice should work for other people. Get to this by clicking “Settings for others” in the sharing menu at upper left. More info here.

The new “Settings for others” screen lets you control the default visibility of several aspects of notation:

Some of these were previously available, but a few of them are new. You can now set the default “Expand repeats” and “Hide empty staves” settings. Plus the design is now consistent with the Appearance section in our player settings.

Improved MIDI export

Our MIDI export now includes information on dynamics. If your music contains dynamic markings or hairpins, these will be reflected as velocity values in the MIDI.

Improved MusicXML export

We’ve improved our MusicXML export feature to handle chord names in a much better way. This fixes a bug where other music software would show the word “other” in the chord name when importing from Soundslice-generated MusicXML.