Today we’ve launched a great new feature that several of you have requested: a “horizontal view” for notation/tab.

When you activate horizontal view, the Soundslice player will continuously scroll notation horizontally — rather than spreading it over multiple lines (staves) as in paper sheet music.

Whether you prefer this is a matter of taste, of course. The advantage is a more compact interface, and the disadvantage is that you see less music at one time.

To activate horizontal view, use the advanced settings menu — which is also new today! Click the Settings button at the bottom right of any Soundslice score, then click “Advanced.” You’ll see a few options:

• Use “infinite horizontal view” — toggles the aforementioned horizontal view.
• Keep playhead at top of screen (or Keep playhead at left of screen, if you have horizontal view active) — controls playhead scrolling behavior. More on this below.
• Hide empty staves — controls whether empty staves are automatically hidden (see our announcement about that from two weeks ago).

At the moment, your preferences are not saved between page loads — you’ll have to set them each time you want to change a score to horizontal view — but we plan to make these preferences saveable.

When horizontal view is active, you can scroll notation by dragging the scrollbar at the bottom of the player, or using a mouse scroll wheel, or using a two-finger drag on a touchpad.

You have two options for playhead scrolling with horizontal view

• If you check Keep playhead at left of screen, the playhead will stay in one place while the notation moves underneath. This can make the music hard to read if you’re trying to learn it, but it’s useful for some purposes.
• If you leave Keep playhead at left of screen unchecked, then the playhead will scroll through one “page” of music at a time.

Astute Soundslice users will notice there’s also a new option for scrolling in the normal (non-horizontal) view: Keep playhead at top of screen. Here’s what that does:

• Default scrolling behavior, without that checked, is to ensure the currently playing bar and the next bar are both visible on the screen at all times; in practice, this results in the playhead being near the bottom of the screen.
• If you check Keep playhead at top of screen, the currently playing bar/stave will always be at the top of the screen. You may prefer this second approach if you’re used to reading from paper sheet music.

Finally, for those of you embedding Soundslice, you can tell your embedded player to default to horizontal view by using the new horiz=1 URL parameter.