Ok, I signed up for a $5/month subscription plan and yesterday did a little bit with it during practice. I think I may have said I’m going to be playing with a cellist soon, and we are planning to do three pieces. For each piece, I have a cello + piano score, and a separate score with the cello part only. Thanks to uploading the cello parts into SoundSlice and using the playback function, I learned that one of the scores is actually wrong! These are all from the same book, and for the other two pieces, the cello part score is exactly the same as the cello part in the full score, so it was actually a huge shock to discover this. It’s like a weird printing error. (An error in the original score, not a SoundSlice error). I’m actually really grateful that I discovered it now, when there’s still time to address it (rather than finding out on the day that we first practice together). Anyway, that’s a bit of thread drift….
So back to SoundSlice. I uploaded the scores through my laptop, and went through what I’ll call the confirmation questions. For the confirmation questions, after you upload the scores, you get an email when they’re ready (each time it only took about 2-3 minutes). Then you have to click through a series of questions while the program confirms that it is correctly interpreting the score. For example, it will show you a close up of a note with a slur line above it and ask you to confirm the type of articulation. Or it will show a word and ask you to confirm the letters and say whether it’s a tempo marking or general text. This process isn’t hard to work through but it kind of feels like a slog, so it’s not something you’d want to do on the fly in the middle of a practice session. Also, I wouldn’t want to do it on a phone. At minimum a tablet, but a laptop with mouse is better for this imo.
After that, the score is ready for playback. From here, I switched to my iPhone, using the Safari browser. For the first score, I set up the playback, choosing the tempo, metronome, and count-in measures. I also hooked up a Bluetooth speaker to my phone, because otherwise I couldn’t hear the playback over my piano. And then I practiced. It worked really, really well.
For the second piece, it was became buggy. I could not get the metronome to change. No matter what tempo numbers I entered, the tempo clicks were always the same (too slow!) I also had a problem when I navigated away from the browser to open up my metronome app. After playing the metronome app (because I was trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the SoundSlice metronome), I found that when I returned to the SoundSlice page in Safari, it would no longer play the audio. Refreshing the page didn’t work. I found myself stuck in a loop, where I would disconnect the Bluetooth speaker, refresh the page, after a few repetitions of this, the audio would work, but then I’d need to check the metronome app again (because SoundSlice wasn’t playing at the right tempo) and when I did that, the SoundSlice audio would disappear again. Between the audio not working and the tempo not being right and being completely unable to adjust the tempo, it was impossible to play along with the playback for this score.
In the end, I was unable to practice this piece at all and it was crazy frustrating. I read online that it might be a lack of compatibility with the Safari browser. This is one drawback to SoundSlice, they don’t have an actual app, you have to use it through a web browser. I imagine that the problems I was having with the audio would have been an easy with a standalone app, but because it was in the browser, and Safari would play audio for other pages (like a YT video), there was no way I could find to reliably resolve this audio problem. You ought to be able to use a Bluetooth speaker, navigate away from the browser, play audio in a different app, and return to the browser and still have the SoundSlice audio play through that Bluetooth speaker. Not being able to do this makes it feel very buggy, like a beta version. I can use Google on my phone, so I’ll try that today and maybe that will be better.
IMO, once the score is scanned in and ready to be used, it needs to be seamless, where you just pull out your phone, set it up on the music stand and start practicing. What I don’t want to do is have to drag my laptop into the piano room, set it up and use that, so if I can’t reliably get SoundSlice to work from my phone, that will probably be a dealbreaker for me.
One more thing I should add. So far, I’ve only scanned in one-line scores (cello part only). These are obviously much simpler than a score with a piano grand staff and an additional instrument or multiple lines for several instruments. Since I discovered the problem with the cello part for one of the pieces, today I’ll try to scan in the full score. Then in order to do playback, I’ll have to mute the piano part, so I’ll report back once I see if that works as intended.