We’re constantly polishing our site and product... Here’s a roundup of what’s new lately.

General site stuff

• We’re now using a content-delivery network for all our media — which, in layman’s terms, means our site is spread across servers around the world, making it faster for you to access.
• Lots of parts of our site are now cached by your browser much more aggressively, leading to faster load times.
• Soundslice Lessons pages will now tell you whether you’ve bought the course you’re looking at. No need to buy it twice!

Soundslice player

• We now detect if you make a super-tiny loop (only a few pixels wide) — this happens often when fat-fingering on touch devices. We’ll assume you meant a playhead seek instead of a loop, and we automatically clear the tiny loop.
• You can now pause during the count-in, when using “Play with count-in.” And this also fixes a bug where you could start multiple count-ins by clicking Play repeatedly.
• The newest Firefox (version 44) has a bug in it that broke Soundslice audio playback. We’ve added a workaround fix, so audio now plays properly in that browser.
• We fixed a bug in autoscrolling where the playhead would inadvertently jump when seeking to the very last system of music.
• We fixed a bug with the synth player where the Play button would have an infinite loading spinner if there was a problem loading our synth samples.

Notation rendering

• Note fingerings are now centered with respect to noteheads. Looks nicer.
• We improved positioning of fingering with respect to articulations such as staccato, tenuto and accents. Previously, sometimes they’d clash.
• If you transpose notation, we now recalculate stem directions instead of maintaining the same direction from the initial notation.
• We now support slides/glissandos without associated tablature.

MusicXML importing

• A common error we’ve noticed is that people enter slurs as ties in Finale/Sibelius. Our importer now catches that error and does the right thing, resulting in proper playback and notation display.
• We improved our detection of which instrument sound to use.
• We’ve made several improvements to our tablature importing. In some cases, tablature notes would incorrectly be given fret number 0; this is now fixed.
• We now properly support MusicXML files that have time-signature changes within tablature.
• We fixed some weird problems with rests at the start of beams.
• We improved the importing of vibrato, triplet feel and slides/glissandos.

Score manager / syncpoint editor

• In the score manager, you can now search for exact phrases, using double quotes.
• We changed the waveform’s playhead to appear behind syncpoints, instead of on top of them. It looks and feels better this way.
• We fixed a bug where waveforms for YouTube videos wouldn’t line up with videos.

Embedding

• The score manager will no longer show you embed codes for scores that aren’t allowed to be embedded. This should clear up some common confusion!
• If you scroll with your mouse wheel over the Soundslice embed, previously we “ate” the scroll such that scrolling would only apply to the Soundslice iframe. Now, we only “eat” the scroll if the Soundslice notation has room to scroll; otherwise, scrolling will apply to the parent page. This is much more natural, and it’s especially nice for short pieces of music that fit entirely within one Soundslice screen.
• The embed now uses only a single JavaScript file, instead of two — leading to a tiny performance boost.