Live Editor
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 let's you edit pan and volume of a single sound or multiple sounds together in a compact and complete space
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 volume and pan of a sound or multiple sounds together.
Because all of the timeline sounds are imported on 0dB and centered you can find them all on the same place in the Constellation. If you start dragging them around you can see that there are more sounds there!
If you start selecting sounds in your timeline or in the Constellation they start appearing blue 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 seperatly of these sounds in the Infopanel.
In the Constellation you can edit both pan and volume of a sound. The volume of a sound in the Constellation ranges from -36dB to 12dB and starts in the center of the Constellation and increasing as you drag the sound more to the blue outside border of the Constellation.
Panning a sound works in a circular way. A sound starts of 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 completly panned either left or right.
When a sound is selected you can see the specific volume and pan amounts of that sound in the Infopanel. You can open this by clicking the triangle button in the Footer.
In the Live Editor view we have replaced the searchbar 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 en right side of the timeline.
The small floating circle below the Constellation can be seen on a lot of pages and it contains functions specificly related to the page that you're on. In this case there is a Live Polling option.
To ensure that the sounds from your timeline also end up in the Live Editor view, Boombox polls all the sounds from the current timeline in a regular interval. This is not really compute-intesive, but on slow workstations or in projects with a lot of sounds this can take a toll on the speed that Boombox functions. With the Live Polling function you can toggle this on or off, but remember when it's toggled off new sounds that are added to the timeline will not be visible in the Constellation view until Live Polling is toggled on or a sound is edited which also triggers polling.
