Soundslice is amazing for syncing notation with real audio/video recordings. But in some cases, a student might want to focus 100% on a video, without the distraction of synced notation. Or a teacher might want to enable our excellent slowdown/looping/navigation features for a video that doesn’t have music notation available.

Today, we’ve launched a collection of features that make all of that possible.

Notationless toggle

If you’re working in a Soundslice score that has video, you now have the ability to make the video full-screen, hiding the notation. This lets you focus directly on the video.

Just click the icon at the upper right of a video:

When the video goes full-screen, you’ll see a waveform below, which lets you make loops simply by dragging across it. (See our separate announcement about that.) And you’ll still be able to control the video’s speed, with the slider at lower left.

To return to the notation view, click the icon in the corner again.

This is a fantastic interface for learning music from video, in situations where synced notation isn’t available or you want to focus fully on the video. Enjoy!

Embedding notationless videos

Around 60 sites embed the Soundslice player to enhance their music-instruction videos. We’ve heard from several of these customers that they love using our player to sync videos with music notation, but they also want to use our slowdown and looping capability for videos that don’t have associated notation.

In some cases, sites have a deep backlog of videos that they haven’t transcribed into notation yet. In other cases, the videos just don’t lend themselves well to synced notation — e.g., they primarily consist of talking instead of music-making.

So today we’ve launched some tweaks to our player to make it useful for video content even when you don’t have associated music notation. Our goal was to build the best video player for music study — with or without notation.

Here’s what’s new:

• Our player now happily supports scores that have no notation. If a score has no notation but has video, Soundslice will use the notationless view we described above. Sweet!
• We’ve added a notationless=1 URL parameter to our player API. If you embed Soundslice, you can use this to force the notationless view for any score that has notation.
• Previously, the score manager wouldn’t give you an embed code for scores with no notation. Now, it’ll happily give you the embed code for any score, regardless of whether the score has notation.

Put together, these new features mean you can use Soundslice as a general-purpose video player that’s specifically been built for music education. Use our synced notation if you can — we believe that’s the ideal online music learning environment — but if you can’t for whatever reason, you can still benefit from Soundslice.