/ Interface / SoundEditor

Sound files can be used by plugins (like Hz.Samplo) and will likely also be produced by your projects, so having integrated sound file previewing and editing tools can be very helpful.

Intro

SoundEditor is a sound editor that works in concert with SoundPlayer, the sound previewer. When you click on a workspace audio file, SoundPlayer is invoked and the sound file is played. However, when you double-click or right-click/Open Editor, an audio file is opened in a new SoundEditor tab. As with all editors, you can have multiple files open in different tabs and copy and paste between them.

SoundEditor is tuned for sound files that are typical in granular or wavetable synthesis, soundbuffer loopers, sample libraries, etc. SoundEditor can read a number of common sound file formats including wav, mp3, ogg. When selecting soundfiles for use in Hz compositions keep in mind that uncompressed files (wav) are typically consumed by sound synthesis engines. SoundEditor can write wav and mp3 files and so can be used in simple format conversion situations.

Interface

Here's a view of a SoundEditor session. Like all Hz editors, SoundEditor is equipped with a menubar with standard File, Edit and Settings menus. In addition, the menubar has audio transport controls to play, pause and navigate within the file.

Your scroll-wheel can be used to zoom in and out of on the audio signal and the scrollbar at bottom can be used to pan in time.

When playing the sound file, the audio cursor (in red) shows the current time and causes audio scrolling to keep the current time centered. You can toggle between play and pause via the Spacebar hotkey (as long as the window has focus).

Audio Selection

When you click-drag in the signal (non-menubar) area you can establish an audio selection. Above this is depicted by the dark-red semi-transparent rectangle. Now if you click on the audio selection you'll play its samples in a loop. You can also tweak the rectangle itself by dragging it to another place or resizing it by dragging on its left or right edge. Finally, you can clear the selection by pressing Escape (when in-focus) or replace it by dragging out a new region.

Once you've made a selection, various editing capabilities become available. If you right-click atop the selection a menu of unoable selection-editing operations are presented.

• Cut deletes the selected samples, places them on the internal clipboard and clears the selection.
• Copy copies the selected samples into an internal clipboard.
• Paste pastes the current clipboard contents, replacing the selected samples or inserting at the current time.
• Mute zeros out the selected samples.
• Dim scales selected samples by .8. Repeating this operating reduces signal strength.
• Duck, Duck2 scale down selected samples when edge feathering.
• Amp, Amp2 scale up selected samples when edge feathering.

See Also

For larger-scale or more full-featured sample file editing, we recommend tools like Audacity and its ilk.