Troubleshooting import issues

Sometimes information gets lost in translation and music doesn’t import properly across separate applications. No worries — generally these problems are small and you can overcome them. Here’s some advice on how to deal with common import problems.

General advice

Soundslice has a fully featured notation editor built in, so you can easily change your notation after you’ve imported. If you spot problems, this is often the quickest way to fix them.

If you spot a consistent problem in the import, it might be a sign that we can improve our importer (assuming the problem isn’t in the original notation program). In this case, please contact us and attach the original notation file so we can investigate. We’ve made hundreds of improvements to our importers over the years thanks to feedback from diligent people like you.

Layout and engraving

An important thing to realize: Soundslice is not a PDF reader. We actually render your music notation “on the fly” to fit whatever device you’re using. We might, for example, decide to put two bars in each system on a small screen, vs. five bars in each system on a larger desktop monitor.

This is similar to how web pages work. A web page looks different on your smartphone than it does on a desktop computer, right? Soundslice is the equivalent, for music notation. This is a good thing — which you will realize if you ever try to read a PDF on a smartphone.

This means you should have the right expectation about notation import. The music in Soundslice will not look identical to your original notation program. The underlying notation data — the notes, rests, chords, accidentals, etc. — will be correct, but the engraving will be different.

So if you’re using another notation editor simply for the purposes of importing into Soundslice, don’t waste your time making little engraving fixes — we will not actually import them.

The one exception is stave breaks. We do indeed import these; see the “Respect author’s stave breaks” checkbox.

If there’s a different (non-positional) aspect of notation that Soundslice isn’t displaying properly, please tell us about it! We are keenly interested in improving our software to deal with the thousands of corner cases of music notation. Please email us your notation file and let us know the specific problem.