The basic unit of our site — a piece of interactive music notation that’s synced with audio/video — has been called a “score” ever since we launched our product in 2014. Today, we’ve changed that. Scores are now called “slices.”

Why the change? A few reasons.

• The term “score” has confused a fair amount of Soundslice users over time. While it’s common to use this term in a more formal setting like a conservatory, or even in traditional music-notation programs, many of our users don’t come from a formal background. When you say “score” to them, they imagine something a classical musician reads during a concert. Using the term to describe something bite-sized, like a two-bar jazz saxophone lick, has always struck us as awkward.
• At the risk of sounding highfalutin, a piece of music on Soundslice is really its own, new thing. It’s not just music notation/tablature, it’s not just audio or video recordings or practice tools — it’s something that fuses everything into one beautiful interface. It’s fresh and different from any other product in the music world. That justifies giving it a distinct name.
• We’ve noticed a bunch of our customers already naturally use “slice” as a noun and verb when talking about putting music into our system.
• Finally, it ties in nicely with our company’s name. :-)

With this change, two things are different across our site today.

First, all our documentation and site copy uses the term “slice” instead of “score.” So, for example, you now use the slice manager instead of the score manager. If you spot a place where we still use the term “score,” please let us know!

Second, slice URLs have changed from /scores/XXXXX/ to /slices/XXXXX/, and we’ve taken the opportunity to change the URLs from using numbers to combinations of letters and numbers, a la YouTube URLs (shorter and more scalable). An example: soundslice.com/slices/pNNNc/.

Importantly, none of our old URLs have gone away. Links to old-style /scores/ URLs will still work as before. And if you embed Soundslice in your site, nothing has changed — in fact, our embed URLs continue to use /scores/. We tread very carefully when making a change like this, and we’ll give plenty of notice if/when we change the way those URLs work.