Soundslice Licensing FAQ

Content/workflow

How do I get my teaching materials into Soundslice?

Use the slice manager, which is the admin area for your Soundslice content. Each piece of music is called a “slice” in our system. If your site does video lessons, then generally each video is a separate slice.

You’re welcome to create a free Soundslice account and start creating slices, to get a feel for it.

What’s the process of syncing notation with audio/video?

Use our web-based syncpoint editor. When you create a slice in the slice manager, you’ll be guided through the process.

Basically, you’ll listen to the audio and tap the keyboard on the downbeat of each bar. Then you can fine-tune the individual syncpoints to your liking. It’s fast and easy.

Is there a way to incorporate Soundslice without having digital notation files or doing the syncing?

Yes! You can use the “notationless” version of our player. It’s a video player that has some extra features for music learning:

• Ability to slow down without changing pitch
• Ability to make fine-grained loops by dragging over a waveform
• Ability to quickly go to a particular moment by clicking on the waveform

The advantage of this player is that it’s very fast to get up and running with Soundslice. The entire importing of your site’s content can be automated.

For more on the notationless player, see our original announcement.

What’s the best way to migrate several years’ worth of content/video/etc. into Soundslice?

There are a few approaches, depending on your philosophy and business strategy:

• The big splash. Build your slices in private, then launch your site’s integration completely Soundsliced.
• Slow and steady. Build your slices one-by-one, integrating them into your site as soon as they’re done. Eventually everything on your site will be Soundsliced, but there will be a period in which some content will and other content won’t.
• Fake it until you make it. Immediately launch everything on your site in our notationless player (see above FAQ question), which will give you immediate benefits. Then gradually fill in notation/syncing for everything.

We’ve helped dozens of customers work through this strategy since we started our licensing business in 2014. The biggest question to consider is: are you OK with the idea of some of your lessons having Soundslice while others don’t (at least temporarily)? There’s no universal correct answer — it depends on your own taste.

Our company has several people managing content. Can multiple admins use Soundslice together?

Yes! This is a common situation, and we’ve built an “organizations” system to accommodate it. Read more in the organizations help section.

The upshot: multiple Soundslice accounts, with separate login credentials/passwords, can share Soundslice materials.

Does Soundslice get to use the content I make? Do I retain ownership?

Soundslice claims no ownership over your content; you retain all ownership rights. We do not use your content in any way beyond what’s necessary to operate our service.

Does Soundslice handle copyright clearance?

Not at this time. Our customers are responsible for securing the rights to whatever music they’re using Soundslice with. We’re responsible for the software; you’re responsible for the content.

Does Soundslice sell its user data?

No way! We do business the old-fashioned way: by providing a useful product for customers who pay for it directly. We do not sell user data, and we do not have advertisements on our site. We use zero third-party trackers.

In short, we treat our customers — and the customers of our customers — how we’d want to be treated ourselves.

Technology

How do I embed a slice in my site?

Edit your slice and click “Share” in the upper right, then select “Embed this slice.” There, you’ll be able to enable embedding on the slice and access the slice’s unique embed code.

Copy and paste that embed code into your website, and it’s as easy as that.

Will my customers need to install or download anything?

No. Everything is web-based. That means your customers simply interact with the Soundslice player directly within your website, using their normal web browser.

Will my customers need Soundslice accounts?

No. Your customers won’t even have to know Soundslice exists (beyond a small, tasteful “Powered by Soundslice” logo in the player).

What kind of security is there around my content?

Your slices are only embeddable on domains (e.g., example.com) that you explicitly specify in an allowlist. This means that people cannot copy your Soundslice embed codes and put them on another site. Your slices will only work on your website.

How are improvements to the Soundslice player handled?

We make improvements and launch new features very regularly; we’re a small and nimble company.

Whenever we make an improvement, it’s immediately available to all of your Soundslice embeds. That’s the beauty of the Internet — things can be continuously improved.

In cases where we launch a feature that, in our judgment, some licensing customers might not want, our policy is:

• We announce the new feature is coming and launch an “opt in” version first, giving you a way to explicitly opt in to the feature in your embeds. This lets you test it out.
• After 30 days, we make it live to all embeds. We also provide a way to opt out of it (depending on the nature of the feature).

Keep an eye on our blog for product announcements!

Am I constrained in how big/small the player is in my site?

No — you can give it whatever width and height you want, and the player will automatically wrap the notation to fit those dimensions. It’s like magic. We recommend using a percentage width (width="100%") so that the player shrinks and expands to fit your site’s users’ devices.

Some of our customers stretch the Soundslice player all the way across their pages, for maximum width. Others include it in a small box in the middle of their pages. The choice is yours.

How stable is the Soundslice platform?

Very. Our backend is hosted on Amazon Web Services with redundant servers across multiple availability zones. It’s a highly scalable infrastructure.

Does Soundslice work with WordPress?

Yes! Several of our licensing customers use WordPress. In fact, our embed codes are just simple HTML, so our player can be embedded in any web page, regardless of publishing platform. It’s just an <iframe>.

Does Soundslice work with videos hosted on Vimeo?

Yes! Several of our customers use Vimeo to host videos. Soundslice integrates with Vimeo nicely — you can link your Soundslice and Vimeo accounts and get access to your Vimeo uploads directly in Soundslice. See this blog post for more.

Our website has its own video-hosting solution. Does Soundslice work with self-hosted videos?

Yes! When you create a slice, you can specify an arbitrary video URL, which can be hosted wherever you want. It just needs to be an MP4.

Can I customize how the player looks and behaves in my site?

Yes! See our comprehensive help section. Use URL parameters to add, change and remove features of our player; use the JavaScript API to control playback, perform your own analytics and more.

Have an idea for an API feature we don’t yet offer? Just let us know. We add functionality to the API for customers regularly.

What analytics does Soundslice provide?

We provide some lightweight reports on the number of unique users so far this month, along with per-day stats and the top accessed slices. Read more here.

If you have the technical capability, you can use our player API to build your own custom solution in addition to what we provide.

Pricing

Soundslice charges based on the number of “unique users.” How does Soundslice measure unique users?

We have two ways of measuring. The preferred method is for you to include a unique user ID directly in the Soundslice embed code. If you don’t do that, we measure the number of unique IP addresses who accessed the Soundslice embed in a month. See here for more information.

There’s no limit to how many times a user views Soundslice, or how many different videos they’ve interacted with.

For example, let’s say you embed Soundslice on your site and Amy is one of your customers:

• If Amy visits your site every day in a given month, accessing 10 different pages that contain the Soundslice player every day, she will count as one unique user that month, and Soundslice will charge you 50 cents.
• If Amy visits your site several times in a given month but never views a page that contains the Soundslice player, Soundslice will charge you nothing (because Amy hasn’t loaded the embedded Soundslice player).
• If Amy doesn’t visit your site at all in a month but still pays you a membership fee, Soundslice will charge you nothing (because Amy hasn’t loaded the embedded Soundslice player).

Is a unique user counted when the player is interacted with, or merely when it’s viewed?

We count page views, not plays. If somebody views a page on your site that contains the Soundslice player, that person will get counted as a unique user — regardless of whether they interact with the Soundslice player in any way.

Do I need to provide user counts to Soundslice every month?

No, you don’t need to send us any reports. Our player knows when it’s been accessed, so all of the unique-user counting is automatic. We do encourage you to send us user IDs in the embed code, so you don’t get double-counted for people accessing our player from multiple devices.

How are payments handled?

You enter a credit card (Visa, Mastercard or American Express) in our system, which we securely store with our payment processor, Stripe. We do not store your credit card details ourselves, for security.

Each month, around the first of the month, you’ll get charged for the previous month’s licensing usage. You’ll get an email with the charge amount and the number of unique users you had.

Is there a minimum term limit?

No. You’re free to quit at any time, at which point you’ll no longer be charged. (Note that quitting means your existing embeds will stop working.)

OK, I’m convinced. How do I get started?

You can test embedding for free! Just create a free Soundslice account and create a slice or two. You’ll be able to activate embedding on any single slice in your account.

Once you’re ready to start in full, head over to the “Change plan” page and select the Licensing plan. You’ll need to enter payment info, but you won’t be charged until the end of your first calendar month of embedding.

Other products

Does Soundslice Licensing have any relationship with the Soundslice Store?

Our store, where we sell instructional material in our interactive format, is a totally separate thing.

Does Soundslice Licensing have any relationship with Soundslice community posts?

The Soundslice community, where people post snippets of musical ideas, is a totally separate thing. Of course, we encourage you to create a channel to promote your brand — it’s easy to do, especially if your content has already been Soundsliced — but you are under no obligation to do so.

Contact us

Got a question we haven’t answered here? Please don’t hesitate to contact us — we’re happy to hear from you!