

Soundslice – Living Sheet Music - pc86
http://www.soundslice.com/#

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adrianh
Thanks for the post. I made a short video demoing some of the features here,
like zooming/responsiveness/snapping:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq1go7Ld1Q4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq1go7Ld1Q4)

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the_cat_kittles
Imagine my pleasant surprise, when, after becoming a huge Gonzalo Bergara and
Adrien Moignard fan, I see a video of a guy who's name I vaguely recognize
playing with them. Then I realize thats the guy who invented the web framework
I use for most paying jobs. Small, interconnected world! You are a good player
Adrian! and how amazing are those two guys I mentioned?

~~~
adrianh
I love Gonzalo and Adrien! Two of my favorite guitarists, and they're super
nice people.

I'm always amused when worlds collide (Django the framework, Django the
musician, Soundslice the product). Thanks for the nice words. :)

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btown
If you're looking for an open-source sheet music renderer, I'd point you to
[http://www.vexflow.com/](http://www.vexflow.com/), which can render to Canvas
or SVG (using Raphael for the latter). It's a barebones visual rendering
library, so audio and things like MIDI interpretation/beautification are out
of scope, but there have been various experiments making editors and different
cool applications with it. It's MIT licensed and decently documented, too!

Also of note (haha) is
[http://www.noteflight.com/](http://www.noteflight.com/) which has a fully
functional Flash editor and is slowly but surely reaching feature parity on a
beta HTML5 version. I'm excited that there's competition in the space - it can
only lead to great things!

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fiatjaf
I don't get it. What is the product/service here? I search for songs, but I
only find crude YouTube videos. In the demos there's a song with a guitar tab,
but no sheet. Apart from the landing page demo I couldn't find any sheet
music. I don't know who transcribes the sheets, who select the songs, I don't
know anything.

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hey_lu
Soundslice is a service where you can transcribe music easily. Many sites that
offer "guitar tabs" use either an ASCII-based format or files for GuitarPro
and similar programs. Soundslice allows you to transcribe directly from a
YouTube video, so you get the original sound together with the tabs, looping,
slowing down and the ability to transcribe songs yourself.

Here's an example: [http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/2865/adrian-holovaty-
everythi...](http://www.soundslice.com/tabs/2865/adrian-holovaty-everything-
means-nothing-to-me-elliott-smith-tab/)

Now they've launched a sheet-music player that's featured on the homepage.
Adrian has posted an article about it on his blog:
[http://www.holovaty.com/writing/soundslice-sheet-
music/](http://www.holovaty.com/writing/soundslice-sheet-music/)

Currently, only they transcribe the sheet-music, via their Pitch Perfect
program: [http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-
perfect/](http://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/)

~~~
allsystemsgo
While it's cool, they only have 7 songs or artists. All of these artists
aren't particularly well known. Usually when I see stuff like this, I assume
that getting the rights to the songs people actually want to learn how to play
is too expensive, so this sort of thing never really takes off. Well, not
never, I just have never seen something as cool as this really get going.

I would love to practice guitar with something like this. Hopefully they start
to offer more songs.

~~~
d23
> I would love to practice guitar with something like this. Hopefully they
> start to offer more songs.

That's my hope as well. It's good to see someone attempting to compete with
ultimate guitar, which lets be honest, hasn't done a damn thing to improve
their site in the last 10 years.

~~~
allsystemsgo
Absolutely.

I won't lie, I've totally stagnated in playing because most learning resources
are awful.

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manuletroll
> _This is not an open-source project that succeeds and fails on the whims of
> its developers_

This is on the licensing page. So not being open-source is now a strong
selling point these days, apparently.

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archagon
Ooooh, they have Ewan Dobson: [https://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/ewan-
dobson-tabs/](https://www.soundslice.com/pitch-perfect/ewan-dobson-tabs/)

Also, this looks like a pretty kick-ass sheet music engine. I've never thought
about it before, but using HTML and CSS for responsive and stylable sheet
music seems like an excellent fit. If only this tech was open source!

~~~
camperman
Oh yeah, Blood and Ice. Talk about a stress test of a sheet music engine.

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hengheng
On my 720p display, I'm unable to glimpse into the second line when I'm at the
last bar. This makes everything unplayable to me.

Two lines should be visible at all times, possibly even with a continuous
vertical scroll. (And in case I'm missing something and two lines are visible
on larger displays: Make it zoom.)

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lerouxb
He demonstrates the zooming slider in the video..

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bane
Cool idea! Especially love the time stretch playback speed slider. Impressive
rendering interface as well.

As an instrumentalist, I'd probably like a more touch friendly interface so I
don't have to drop my equipment (bow, pick, etc.) to pick up my mouse and just
finger the interface.

~~~
lerouxb
Doesn't that work already? He did mention that it works on phones and tablets.

~~~
bane
I'm sure it works well enough, but some control elements, like the sliders
looked a little fidgety for my fat fingers.

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y2bd
If the demo on the front page isn't working for you and you have HTTPS
Everywhere installed, disabling it temporarily seems to work.

~~~
adrianh
Sorry about that. It's fixed now!

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Widdershin
Just a heads up, the demo wasn't working for me properly using HTTPS
everywhere as well. The music would play, but nothing aside from the progress
bar/slider would show in the white box, and the full demo never got past
reticulating splines.

The issue went away after disabling HTTPS everywhere and restarting FF.

FF 27.0.1 on Win7 x64.

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Springtime
I'm surprised this has been around since late 2012 and I've only just heard of
this now.

The Youtube section I think was the drawcard for me, really neat UI.

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alexkearns
When I view your website in my browser (safari 5.1.10 on Mac OSX 10.6.8), the
home page refreshes every second or so. This is unlikely to be good for your
servers.

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prawn
Looks great. In the demo, the sound seems a bit weird and off-putting when the
speed is set to slowest. Not sure if that is unique to that song or otherwise
fixed.

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midgetjones
That's just a thing that happens, I don't think there's a way you can 'fix'
it.

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TylerE
Sorry, GuitarPro beat you to the punch by about 8 years.

~~~
neilk
You have a point. Innovation ends when one company achieves success.

Ok, let's assume SoundSlice never adds any feature that Guitar Pro doesn't
have already, never goes after a different market, never interacts with
customers differently, etc. etc. Just doing it in a browser is a very
interesting thing. With just a little more love it looks like it will be fully
mobile ready. And you can embed SoundSlice in any page on the web. They seem
to be more interested in making the raw technology and partnering with others
- who knows, maybe there will be music players for musicians with a "learn
this" button. And Soundslice is two-person company, with one codebase, versus
Arobas' 20 people and different apps for every platform. Totally different
cost structure.

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jay-anderson
What are they using for the music rendering?

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adrianh
I wrote a sheet-music rendering engine in JavaScript. It's all our own stuff.

~~~
jay-anderson
Very impressive. The only other javascript renderer I know of is vexflow
([http://www.vexflow.com/](http://www.vexflow.com/)). I think the output of
yours is superior (the vexflow slurs and ties are way too heavy among other
issues).

Any reason you didn't go with lilypond or some other existing solution?
(Reading a bit more on your site it sounds like licensing the rendering is
part of your business model. I may have answered my own question.) Also, I'm
glad you using Behind Bars. It's a great reference.

One comment: I think your tuplets can use some work. They seem too large to my
eye and sometimes they are too far from the beam or notes (see about 8
measures from the end in the auld lang sine). Tuplet numbers are allowed to
collide with the staff lines. However Gould recommends that they not be wholly
within the staff.

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tunesmith
looks like the sync is off on Safari - playback header is ahead of the notes,
and the gap increases over time.

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balls187
Totally dig this. Just a small nit, a volume control on the main page would be
great.

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guscost
It works great (well, a lot better than expected) on mobile devices! Nice job.

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joliv
Just to make sure—this is only for guitar, right?

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adrianh
Not just guitar. Any instrument whose sounds can be expressed in sheet music,
so basically any mainstream instrument. :-)

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brianobush
might want to make this more obvious. I went looking for piano and didn't see
any demos.

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ihaveqvestion
On a preview page, where is the Buy button?

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adrianh
Good idea. We should add that. :-)

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adinb
Any plans for vocals as well?

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telvda
love it. reminds me of that guitar player pro program.

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lucidrains
Awesome job dude!

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notastartup
are there any open source libraries that is dedicated to interactive sheet
music like the one on soundslice? It's really well done.

