Repeats and directions

Here’s how to set repeats and directions (also known as “jumps”) using the Soundslice editor.

Start-repeat barlines

To change a bar to start with a “start repeat” barline, select any note or rest within the bar, then:

• In editor’s top panel, open the “Repeats” section and click the “Toggle start repeat barline” icon
• Or: Search the editor for “Toggle start repeat barline.”
• Or: Use a keyboard shortcut.

End-repeat barlines

To change a bar to end with an “end repeat” barline, select any note or rest within the bar, then:

• In editor’s top panel, open the “Repeats” section and click the “Toggle end repeat barline” icon .
• Or: Search the editor for “Toggle end repeat barline.”
• Or: Use a keyboard shortcut.

Soundslice will ask you how many times it should repeat — in other words, how many times should it play back. By default, this is 2. You can change this to a larger number to play back more than twice.

To delete an end-repeat barline, just click on the barline itself. You’ll see the “How many times should it repeat?” screen again. There’s a Delete button at the bottom left.

Alternate endings (voltas)

To change a bar to use an alternate ending number (or multiple alternate ending numbers), select any note or rest within the bar, then:

• In editor’s top panel, open the “Repeats” section and click the “Set alternate endings” icon .
• Or: Search the editor for “Set alternate endings.”
• Or: Use a keyboard shortcut.

Soundslice will ask you to enter the ending numbers, separated by commas. For example.

To remove an alternate ending number from a bar, select a note or rest in the bar and click the “Set alternate endings” icon in the current notations section. In the resulting screen, there’s a Delete button at the bottom left.

Using more than two endings

To notate a repeat with more than two endings, you have a few options.

You can use multiple repeat-end barlines, like this:

Or you can use a single repeat-end barline that’s been marked as a multiple repeat. Click the repeat-end barline and enter the number of times the music is played. In this example, it’s 3 instead of the usual 2:

Here’s a slight variation in which the final repeat comes after the repeat-end barline:

Alternate endings have been inconsistently notated over the years, and there’s no single “right way” to do it. What’s more, notation programs differ in their approaches. If you’ve imported a MusicXML file and you find the repeats aren’t playing back as you’d expect, use one of the above formats to get things working.

Directions (D.C. al Fine, Coda, Dal Segno, etc.)

We support all the standard types of directions/jumps. They’re displayed in notation and honored during playback. Here’s an interactive example:

To change a bar to use a direction, select any note or rest within the bar, then open the “Repeats” section in the top panel and click the “Set direction” icon . You’ll see the directions screen:

Any directions currently active in the selected bar will be highlighted. Click one of the directions to add it to the bar, or click a highlighted direction to remove it from the bar.

A slightly faster way of adding directions is to use our editor search. Search for “Set direction” and you’ll see the various available directions directly in the search results. This bypasses the separate directions screen.

Replaying repeats after jumps

For backward jumps, such as “Da Capo” or “D.S. al Fine,” our default playback will replay any repeat barlines encountered the second time through. For example, in this music…

…our default playback will play the bars in this order: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 2, 3. That is, after the “Da Capo” jump, bars 1 and 2 will be repeated due to the repeat bar at the end of bar 2.

In some cases, you might not want the repeat to happen after a jump. To achieve this in our editor, click the direction text (“Da Capo” in the above example). You’ll see a small screen:

“Replay repeats after following this direction” will be checked by default. Uncheck it to change the behavior for that particular Da Capo marking. After making this change, playback for the above example would change to: 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3.

Similes (“repeat the previous bar”)

A simile marking is shorthand for “repeat all the notation in the previous bar.” In Soundslice, the player’s synthetic playback will honor simile markings.

Soundslice supports two types of simile markings: “Repeat previous bar” and “Repeat previous two bars.” To create one, select any note or rest within the bar that should contain the marking, then open the “Repeats” section in the top panel and click one of the two “Toggle simile” buttons ( or ).

Note that this will clear whatever notation is in your selected bar! If you made a mistake, just hit Control+Z to undo.

To remove a simile marking from a bar: Click the simile marking, then click the simile icon ( or ) in the current notations section.

Note: We don’t support adding notes or rests in a bar that’s been marked as a simile.