Practicing with PDFs/photos
Soundslice has its own notation graphics engine, which draws your sheet music according to your screen size. But some musicians prefer to practice with a specific engraving — say, the exact score they’re going to perform from, or a particular edition by a publisher.
No problem! Our image layout feature lets you use Soundslice practice features with PDFs or photos of music. You get the best of both worlds: the interactivity (and audio syncing) of Soundslice plus the exact visual score you’re comfortable with.
How it works
When viewing a slice that has an associated notation image, open the settings panel via the button at lower right of the player. Then look for the “Layout” section and choose “Image”:
This will immediately change the music to use your image instead of our graphics engine:
You can always switch back to the Soundslice version using that same “Layout” section in the player settings.
Practicing with an image
Image layout works basically the same as “normal” layout, though there are a few limitations.
Press Play to hear the audio synced with the notation. The playhead will move over your image:
Click anywhere on the notation to move the cursor to that location.
Drag over the notation to loop a section:
Your slice can be synced with a real recording (audio or video), and/or you can use synthetic playback.
You can zoom the notation in/out as normal (see here).
Limitations:
- We can’t make any notational changes. So if you want to transpose, hide parts/notations or use horizontal layout, you can’t use image layout.
- If you enter focus mode, we’ll automatically switch to the Soundslice graphics engine.
Enabling image layout for a slice
Image layout is available for any slice that’s been created using our PDF/image scanner. After doing the scan, you’ll just need to opt into the feature as follows:
- Open your slice in edit mode.
- In the bottom half of the screen, where you see the original image, click and activate the “Practice with this image” option.
From then, image layout will be available for this slice.
Access
If you’ve activated this feature on a slice, it will be available for anybody who has access to your slice (for example, if you’ve shared it).
There’s no way to enable the feature only for yourself while disabling it for other people on the same slice.
My slice wasn’t created with the PDF/image scanner. Can I add an image to it?
Not at this time. This feature is only available for slices that were initially created via the scanning feature.