Lots of new stuff to announce today:

More flexible chord positioning

It’s finally possible to do this:

Previously, chord names/diagrams could only be displayed over a note or rest. Now, they can be anywhere in a bar, even if there’s no corresponding note or rest at that position.

See “Chord positions” on our updated help page for more info.

We’ve also updated our MusicXML importer and PDF/image scanning engine to detect these types of chords and put them in the right position.

New theme preference

We’ve added a “Theme” section to your account settings page. This lets you specify whether Soundslice should use dark mode, light mode or auto.

We already supported dark mode, but it was a bit too complicated yet not complicated enough. Previously, our site’s dark mode was tied to your operating system’s preference, and our player’s dark mode (a separate concept) was controlled in the player settings. Now, the two concepts have been unified, and it’s finally possible to specify a site dark mode setting without changing your OS-level dark mode setting.

To simplify things, we’ve removed the dark mode section from our player’s settings menu.

Note that we have two concepts of auto: “Auto” and “Auto / player light.” The first means that, if your OS is in dark mode, then everything on Soundslice will be in dark mode, including music (white notes on a dark background). The second option puts everything in dark mode except music, which remains in a white background. Given that white notes on a dark background is a bit nontraditional, we wanted to provide this middle-ground option.

For more, see the theme help page.

Keyboard shortcut panel in player

Our player’s settings menu now includes a button that will display the keyboard shortcuts:

You can also hit Shift ? (question mark) at any time to display this new shortcuts panel.

Keyboard shortcut assignment via editor search

We made it faster and easier to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in our editor. In the editor search box, each search result now has a way to assign a shortcut. Just click the “...” to the right of any result and select “Create shortcut,” like so:

Synth improvements

We’ve greatly improved how our synth playback handles bends. Previously the sound was split into discrete pitches, but now it uses a continuous pitch bend. It actually sounds something like a bend now!

Speaking of the synth playback, we’ve also fixed some bugs with instruments playing notes too staccato and/or too long.

More correct line breaks in MusicXML imports

We’ve changed our MusicXML importer to preserve the exact bar/system layout from your uploaded MusicXML file.

This is a bit subtle/obscure. For every bar of music, our system has three options: “Force a line break before this bar,” “Never put a line break before this bar,” and “Auto.” Previously, our MusicXML importer set the “Force a line break before this bar” option but never set “Never put a line break before this bar.” Now, we set both.

As a result, system layouts are now exactly preserved between your MusicXML file and the Soundslice display. Put another way: if three bars are displayed together in your MusicXML, then they’ll always be displayed together in Soundslice. Previously this wasn’t the case, because our graphics engine would sometimes decide to add extra line breaks.

Note you can always use our editor’s “Reset all line breaks” command (available via editor search) to clear that data. You can also uncheck “Respect author’s stave breaks” in the player settings, if you’d like to keep the data but temporarily bypass it.

Music scanning: tremolo support

Our PDF/image scanning engine now detects tremolo markings. As with other notations, we’ll ask a question for any tremolos we’re unsure about:

Music scanning: detection of implied triplets

The scanning engine also now detects implied triplets. This is a surprisingly common situation where a publisher decides not to print the “3” for repeated triplets. Like in the Moonlight Sonata:

Previously, our scanning engine required each triplet to have a visible “3” — otherwise we wouldn’t detect it. Now we have an additional layer of logic that tries to detect those implied triplets.

Music scanning: detection of non-standard tab tunings

The scanning engine now tries to detect non-standard tab tunings. Previously, we only supported a handful of common tunings such as standard guitar tuning. If you uploaded an image with a different tuning, you were out of luck.

This new feature only works if there’s a standard notation staff above the tablature. For each note, it detects the string’s pitch by reconciling the tab fret/string with the associated note. If we can deduce all strings’ tunings (it’s not always possible, depending on the music), then we’ll properly set the tuning in your import.