As always, we’re constantly polishing and improving Soundslice. Here’s the latest:

Renaming tracks/parts

When you upload notation to Soundslice, we use the track names from your notation file — but sometimes you might want to change them without needing to go back to your original notation program. Now you can!

For any score that you own, you’ll now see a pencil icon in track controls:

Click that, and you’ll be able to rename your track. It’ll be saved as soon as you hit “Enter” or click anywhere else on the page.

Changing default notation view

You probably know that you can use the track controls to hide bits of notation for a given track: you can toggle display of standard notation, tablature, stemmed tablature, chord names/diagrams and lyrics.

Until today, we always displayed everything by default. Now, you can toggle the various bits and save your current view — for yourself and anybody else who views your score. For any score that you own, you’ll see a “Set default” button in track controls whenever you modify the view. Click that, and we’ll save those preferences for the score.

Soundslice player

• Previously, the bottom of the track controls got cut off if your screen wasn’t tall enough. Now, if you’re on a smaller screen, you’ll see a scrollbar in that situation, allowing you to still access everything.
• We cleaned up the display of track labels to the left of notation. Previously, in case of overly long track names, track names would stomp over each other. No longer.
• For a long time, a few of the sliders in Settings were annoying to use because they required you to place your mouse just so. Now that’s fixed.
• For YouTube videos, we now properly stop the playhead if there’s a YouTube error during playback. We also no longer display an error message if you press play before the video is ready; that was counterproductive and felt awkward.

Notation rendering

• Sometimes iOS devices wouldn’t properly load our music font — resulting in random emoji characters being displayed over the staff lines (yes, seriously!) or improper notation spacing. This is now fixed.
• We improved vibrato rendering. Previously it was drawn one beat at a time; now it’s drawn in a more holistic way.
• Notation renders more quickly now. We’re always working on speed and performance.
• We fixed percussion tracks to never display accidentals.
• We fixed certain bits of notation, such as 8va signs, to remain black during playback, instead of getting highlighted in red.
• We made notation spacing tighter. More to come in this area.
• 8vb and 16vb signs now correctly get rendered below notes, not above.
• We fixed a bug with grace notes at the end of bars.
• We improved rendering with stacked fingerings and slurs.

MusicXML importing

• We now do a better job of automatically detecting swung 8th/16th notes, segno signs, coda signs, D.C. al Fine, grand staffs and rehearsal markings — despite the best efforts of notation programs whose MusicXML exports do not encode that data properly. Take that, notation programs!
• If you upload a MusicXML file that has tablature without standard notation, previously Soundslice would display the standard notation. Now, we’ll now automatically hide the standard notation by default, so your Soundslice score looks just like your original notation file. You can always turn on the standard notation in track controls.
• We fixed several bugs with tablature and chord importing.
• We now do a better job of importing percussion sounds from MusicXML files, if that data is in the file. (That is, we’ll know whether a note should use a bass drum sample vs. a cymbal. If it’s specified in your file.)
• For tablature, we do a much better job of converting slurs to hammer-ons and pull-offs.
• We’re smarter about importing tempos and metronome markings. If a tempo is in MusicXML but is marked as hidden, we’ll import it but not display it; previously we’d display it.
• We now handle weird stuff such as <duration>0</duration>, generated by old notation programs.

Score manager / syncpoint editor

• In the syncpoint editor, you can now double-click the current time in the upper left to jump to that exact time. Nice!
• In the syncpoint editor, when you load the page, we now pan the waveform to the location of the first syncpoint.
• We made a bunch of the various forms look better, with a more consistent design. More to come here.
• Much of the score manager, along with the rest of our site, now has breadcrumb navigation. It gives you a better sense of where you are in the site.
• The score manager’s search now searches folder names.
• When you add a recording and switch among recording types, the associated text box will automatically get cursor focus, helping you enter data more quickly.

Embedding

• You can now show/hide notation for particular tracks in a score! See the new “Showing/hiding notation for certain tracks” section in the URL parameters documentation.
• We improved the 404 page for the embed to be simpler instead of our standard, heavy Soundslice “Page not found” design.
• You can now get notified whenever somebody hits the “Print” button, using the new ssPrint event.