Live Editor

Compose on the perfect stage

Summary

Sounds are essential in motion design and settings these up can be hard and confusing. That's why we started a mission to set up sounds more visually and see how all your sounds fit together. The Live Editor is the tool we ended up with and it lets you edit the pan and volume of a single sound or multiple sounds together in a compact and complete space

Constellation

The main part of the Live Editor is the Constellation where you can see all of your timeline sounds and drag them around. In the Constellation you can simultaneously control the volume and pan of a sound or multiple sounds together.

Constellation with sounds on start up

Because all of the timeline sounds are imported on 0dB and centered you can find them all in the same place in the Constellation. If you start dragging them around you can see that there are more sounds there!

Selected Sound

If you start selecting sounds in your timeline or in the Constellation they start appearing yellow indicating that you are editing this sound or multiple sounds. By Shift + Click, you can add or remove sounds from your selection. In the Constellation you can adjust the volume and pan of only one sound indicated by turning yellow. If you have multiple sounds selected you can edit the pan and volume separately of these sounds in the Info panel.

Volume

In the Constellation you can edit both the pan and volume of a sound. The volume of a sound in the Constellation ranges initially from -60dB to 15dB and starts in the center of the Constellation and increasing as you drag the sound more to the blue outside border of the Constellation. You can customize the volume range to your liking in one of the Constellation preferences.

Volume range and changing it to your liking.

Panning

Panning a sound works in a circular way. A sound starts above the center at 00° and pans to left or right depending on which way you drag the sound, all the way to below the center of the Constellation where the sound is completely panned either left or right.

When a sound is selected you can see the specific volume and pan amounts of that sound in the Info panel. You can open this by clicking the triangle button in the Footer.

Audio skinning

To edit the sounds with a bit more context to their neighboring sounds, you can try out the Audio Skin function. It essentially filters sounds to only show a couple of previous sounds and next sounds, so you will get a nice overview of where a sound group is placed in space.

Toggling Audio Skin and other options are hidden under the Ghost icon in the top left corner of the constellation. Turning on Audio Skin will give every sound a more unique color as well, compared to the regular view. The next option to toggle is Audio Ghosts. If toggled on, all sounds that are currently not editable are displayed by a greyed-out cross. The Pre and Post options of the Audio Skin menu are sliders for you to determine how many sounds you want to display before the selected sound and after the selected sound.

Audio Skin menu

Selecting a different sound in the Constellation while Audio Skin is on will not update the group that you are working in. To go to the next selection group you can use the arrows in the audio timeline.

Constellation options

The circle on the right bottom corner of the Constellation contains a couple of small functions.

Auto-Play

When the Auto-Play is toggled on, sounds will automatically play after updating them. This way you can hear the new volume and/or pan of the sound.

Grid Visibility

Grid visibility lets you toggle the grid that is displayed on the Constellation for a more clear view.

Live Polling

Turning the Live Polling on or off will determine when Boombox pulls the sounds from your timeline. After updating a sound in the Constellation Boombox will always update, but if Live Polling is turned off and you add sounds to your timeline then these will not show up in the Constellation. In larger projects with loads of sounds, polling them into Boombox all the time can be really CPU intensive and that's why it's recommended to turn Live Polling off then.

Timeline

In the Live Editor view, we have replaced the search bar with a mini timeline of all the sounds in your current project. Every sound is represented with a small block and by clicking on one you can select the sound. We made it also easy to cycle through sounds with the arrows on the left and right sides of the timeline.