Back in February, we launched a feature called synth overlay — the ability to play synthetic and real audio at the same time. Today we’ve expanded it, so that you can use this feature outside our editor and make it available for anybody viewing your slice.

We originally intended the feature to be used for music transcription: to compare the notes you’ve written with the notes in the original recording. We didn’t imagine it would be useful outside the context of editing your own slice.

But we immediately heard from several Soundslice users who pointed out this feature could be handy when learning and practicing music as well. Some examples:

• You’re in a choir, and you’d like to hear your vocal part (synthetic) over a real backing track.
• You’re studying a drum part, and you’d like to artificially increase its volume while still listening to the original recording (by playing synthetic drums on top).

Synth overlay makes both of those possible. And kudos to our creative users for pointing these ideas out to us!

Based on this feedback, we’ve now made it possible to use synth overlay outside our editor. You can turn this on via the advanced slice settings: choose “Enable synth overlay” there.

For more info, see our updated synth overlay help page.