Quantised Audio

Copying an audio file to the correct folder

To set up for quantising your audio, the audio files need to be copied into the AudioFile folder in the specific Project folder. See the Placing media files for a project sub-chapter to understand where to copy an audio file. Also save the file to a supported file format.

Adding an audio file to a track

A track containing non audio regions will display its bars in red and/or blue.

Non-audio regions for a track are displayed in red and/or blue

To add an audio file to the track

1. Right-click the first bar of the track and select set audio track from the popup menu. You will then get an AudioTracks manager.
2. Left-click the audio file you want and the display will change: the audio file becomes the guide audio for the track. To indicate this, the bars will colour green and the name of the audio track will be displayed on the title bar :

Quantising Audio

Note

Please note: Before proceeding with the steps listed below for quantising audio, please see the sub-chapter Setup Quantising.

Note

Please note: a handy tip when you are quantising an audio track is to use the keyboard shortcuts [ and ] to navigate the quantiser window left and right. To learn more useful shortcuts please see the sub-chapter Keyboard Shortcuts.

Quantising an audio track

Quantising means dragging beatmarkers over the audio track to tell Designer where the beats are. To quantise an audio track you need to open the quantiser window.

To open the quantiser window for the current audio track:

1. Hit Alt-Q. Hitting Alt-Q again closes the quantiser window once it is open.
2. Play the track until you find the first beat and drag the closest marker to it.
3. Then drag the next marker to the following beat.
4. Now play forward; you will see a series of dotted markers that gradually drift offtime. The dotted markers are autogenerated by Designer.
5. At any point, you can grab a dotted marker and drag it to bring it in line with the nearest beat. At this point it becomes a solid line. Dotted markers between your manually positioned markers move to space themselves equally.
6. At any time, you can zoom in or out using the mouse scroll wheel. This allows you to see more detail and thus position the markers more accurately.
7. The metronome button plays each marker as an audible beat to check how well the beatgrid lines up. The Metronome button has a Volume control next to it. Left-click the white volume bar or text field to modify the Metronome volume. You can fill in any number between 0 (mute) and 255 (full) in the text field. These are the minimum and maximum values.
8. Hit Alt Q to close the quantiser when you have finished quantising your track.

Note

Please note: that the metronome will only output on the Director machine in a Director/Actor/Understudy environment due to the quantiser only being drawn on the Director.

Quantiser properties

The quantiser contains further editing options.

To open the Quantiser menu:

Right-click the quantiser windows title bar.

The editing options are:

Unquantise : This option will delete any markers previously positioned over the track and close the quantiser window.

Shift all markers one frame left : This option will take all of your positioned markers and move them one frame to the left. This is useful if your markers are positioned too late in relation to the beats in the track but you want to move all of the markers uniformly.

Shift all markers one frame right : This option will take all of your positioned markers and move them one frame to the right. This is useful if your markers are positioned too early in relation to the beats in the track but you want to move all of the markers uniformly.

Replace audio : This option will replace the current audio file in the track with another audio file. This is useful if, for example, you are rehearsing a music show and the rehearsal crew want to test different versions of the same song.

To replace audio:

1. Left-click replace audio from the Quantiser editor. This will open the AudioFiles manager which displays a list of all of the audio files saved on your local hard-drive in the AudioFile folder.

See the Placing media files for a project sub-chapter to understand where to copy an audio file. Also save the file to a supported file format.

2. Left-click the audio file you want to replace the current audio file. The name of the audio track will be updated on the Track Player and quantiser windows title bars.

Set bpm : This option will reset the current tracks beats per minute to whatever value the user sets.

Advanced Quantiser Settings

Inserting bars of silence

At any point, you can insert extra bars into your Track (for example if the audio file changes, but you don’t have access to a new version).

To insert bars of silence:

1. Right-click the bar at the point where you want to insert time. This will open the Track bars menu.
2. Type the number of bars you want to add in the Insert Bars text field and hit Enterdisguise will insert the appropriate number of silent bars for you. In this example we have inserted five bars of silence.

## Adding more than one audio file to a track

For some applications (for example rock shows), it makes sense to have one audio file per track. For other shows (such as theatre) it makes more sense to have multiple audio files on the same track, separated by silences. This allows smooth transitions from one musical section to another.

To add an audio track:

1. Extend the length of the track. For information on how to extend the length of the track, see the Editing tracks sub-chapter.
2. Right-click an audio free section (shown as red or blue bars) to open the Track bars menu.
3. Left-click Insert Audio Track. This will open the Audio Tracks Manager.
4. Left-click the Audio Tracks Manager to add the audio file to the point of the currently selected Track bar.
5. Move the cursor in that region and hit ALT Q to open the quantiser window.

Note

Please note: It is recommended that you quantise the audio file before you start animating content layers in the region. The software will re-time content events, but may not do so perfectly accurately.

Duplicating Track bars

You can also select any number of bars and duplicate them:

1. Select a Timeline region by holding down the left Shift key and then dragging the cursor across the bars at the bottom of the window.
2. Right-click the grey region and select Duplicate Bars:

Removing bars

Select a timeline region by holding down the left Shift key and dragging the cursor across the bars you want to remove, as illustrated in the previous section. Then rightclick the grey region and select Remove Bars.

Note

Removing bars will remove all content layers and events within the removed region. The undo function, CTRL-Z, is your friend.