Here’s what’s new on Soundslice lately:

Syncpoint editor redesign

We’ve updated the design of our syncpoint editor, with the goals of making it clearer and easier to use.

Here’s the old design:

And here’s the new design:

The biggest difference is a reorganization. The old waveform had a lot of functionality within a small amount of space, meaning it was easy to click the wrong thing by mistake. Now, there are three separate sections: the waveform, the syncpoint option menus and the guide notes at bottom.

The delete button now lives within the syncpoint option menu, rather than always being visible. It’s also much easier to access this menu — an easier click target.

Cropping is easier now, and hopefully more intuitive. Previously, there were scissor icons at the bottom of the interface, but they were hard to notice because they were usually offscreen. Now, there’s an explicit “Crop recording” button, which will enter crop mode:

This uses thick bars at either side of the audio, which are a familiar interface from other audio-cropping software.

Guide notes have moved to a dedicated row — sort of like a mini score within the syncpoint editor. We’ve heard from many people that they didn’t realize those guide notes are draggable for fine-grained tweaks, so we’re hoping the new UI makes it more obvious.

In multi-instrument (or just multi-voice) music, how do you decide which instrument’s music is shown as guide notes? You’ll now see a button at the far right, showing the name of the current instrument. (That’s “Guitar” in the image above.) Click that to toggle through all instruments in your slice, changing the guide notes. Previously this feature was buried in the “More” menu and we suspect nobody knew about it.

We’ve also changed the guide notes to be hidden when you zoom out. At a certain point, those notes just became a jumbled mess — so we fade them out:

For MP3 recordings, the pitch correction options are now tucked behind a “Pitch shift” button. Just keeps things cleaner, since it’s unlikely anybody needs that to always be visible.

And finally, there’s a dedicated Help button — mostly intended for new users who are wondering what the heck this syncing stuff is all about!

MP3 export

You can now export an MP3 of any slice you’ve created. It’ll be generated using our synthetic playback, honoring your current solo/mute settings.

We’ve added this feature based on feedback from choir directors who want to make it easy for singers to export practice tracks containing just their part.

To use the new feature, go into your slice sharing settings and check the box for “Enable synth export.” Then, anybody viewing your slice will see an “Export synth audio” button in the player.

There are a few small caveats for now. Read more in the new help page.

Support for half-open hi-hats

We’ve added support for two new symbols, both for half-open hi-hats in percussion music.

There’s no functional difference between them; different people simply like different styles here.

You can find them in our editor’s Notes panel, or search for “Toggle half-open (1)” or “Toggle half-open (2).”

Improvements to sheet music scanning

We’ve improved our detection of multi-voice music — fixing situations where we created too many voices.

And our system now supports transparent PNG images. They should scan properly rather than saying “No noteheads detected.”

New editor commands

We’ve added the following in our editor:

• “Reset all accidentals” — clears any accidental overrides you’ve made and resets according to our standard accidental rules.
• “Delete all dynamic markings” — deletes all the dynamics. This is handy for the occasional online tab that went overboard with defining a different dynamic for each note.

Both commands are available via editor search.