Managing content on Soundslice

Slices

A slice is a piece of music notation of any length. It might be a simple two-bar guitar lick, a 32-bar string-quartet piece, or even a full concert band score. It can have any number of instruments/parts.

Everything in Soundslice is oriented around slices. They’re the fundamental unit of the site.

**Create a slice** by clicking the “New slice” icon in the slice manager.

On the subsequent page, **specify the name** and, optionally, the artist/composer.

Then, you’ll see shortcuts to either **enter notation** or **add a recording**. You can do them in either order.

Notation / tablature

To enter notation in a slice, you have two options. You can upload a notation file — something you’ve either acquired or created in another program such as Finale, Guitar Pro, MuseScore, PowerTab or Sibelius — or you can use the notation editor that’s built into Soundslice.

If you upload a notation file, you can of course use the Soundslice notation editor to make tweaks to it.

Recordings

By default, our player uses instrument samples to play your slice’s audio, with a MIDI-like sound. But Soundslice really shines when you sync notation with real recordings.

For our purposes, a recording is audio or video of a specific performance of a slice. With Soundslice, you can associate multiple recordings with a single slice.

**Choose the type of recording** — a file upload, YouTube video, video URL or Vimeo video.

If your recording is an MP3 or video, **upload the MP3 or MP4 file**. It’ll be stored securely on soundslice.com.

If your slice has multiple recordings, **reorder recordings** using the up and down arrows in the slice manager. This ordering will be used in the “Recordings” menu. Whichever recording is last will be the default.

Syncpoints

Syncpoints are how Soundslice aligns notation with audio/video. For example, a syncpoint means something like “The start of measure 2 in the notation corresponds to 0:05 in the audio.”

Use the syncpoint editor to create, edit and delete syncpoints. Each recording gets its own syncpoints, and Soundslice provides an easy way to copy them across recordings, if needed.

The subsequent page is the **syncpoint editor**. On top, you’ll see a waveform display of your audio. Below, you’ll see the notation (or blank space, if you haven’t entered notation yet). Note there are separate playheads — the vertical orange lines — in both places.

The first time you load the syncpoint editor for a recording, it won’t yet have any syncpoints. Hence, if you press Play, the orange playhead in the notation **won’t move**; it doesn’t yet know how the audio and notation are related.

To create syncpoints, press Play and click “Add downbeat” — or hit the T key — on each downbeat, i.e., the “one” of every measure. You’ll see a black circle appear in the waveform, representing the syncpoint at the start of the measure.

Once you’ve added syncpoints, the orange playhead above the notation will line up with notation according to the syncpoints you’ve created. This gives you immediate feedback on how your syncpoints influence the synced playback.

You can also add syncpoints while audio is paused. Click anywhere in the waveform, then click “Add downbeat.”

To move a syncpoint, click and drag it left or right. To delete a syncpoint, click the “X” below it. Click “Clear syncpoints” to delete all syncpoints and start over.

To change a syncpoint’s measure number, double-click it and type the new number. Use this technique to save time by creating only a few syncpoints (watch demo).

For expressive music, syncpoints on the downbeats might not be enough. You can fine-tune **inner-bar syncpoints** by dragging the “guide notes” above the waveform left and right. Read more.

**Save your changes** by clicking “Save” at upper right. Changes won’t be saved until you do this.

For more on the syncpoint editor, watch this overview video. Then watch this second video to learn about the syncpoint-renaming shortcut.

Folders

Keep your slice organized by creating folders. You can create as many folders as you’d like, and folders can be nested within one another.

**Create a folder** by clicking the “Add a folder” icon in the slice manager.

**Specify the folder name**. It’ll be created within whatever folder you’re currently viewing.

To **move a slice to a folder**, click the “Move to folder” icon next to the slice, then select the destination folder.

Embedding

Soundslice licensing partners get the superpower of embedding slices in their own sites. To embed a slice, take the following steps.

First, when creating or editing the slice, enable embedding. You have two options:

Allowed on any domain
Allowed on whitelist domains

If you’re concerned about keeping your content locked down, use the whitelist option for the most security. To edit your whitelist, visit this page (this page is only available for licensing partners) and enter the domain(s) your embed should be limited to, one domain per line, e.g. example.com. Note that www.example.com and example.com are treated as separate domains, so you’ll likely want to include both the www and non-www versions of your URLs if applicable.

Finally, get the embed code for a specific slice using the slice manager. Note you can tweak the width and height to your liking.

Bonus fun for developers: our embed player has an API.