Basic interface usage
The content-based audio editor allows users to edit audio stories that take advantage of the content of speech and music.
Basics
- Press
enter
or click
to render the current timeline.
- Press
space bar
or click
to play the current timeline. This will (usually) force a re-render if necessary, but it's occasionally buggy so I'd recommend rendering first (enter
)
- Scrub by clicking in the timeline.
Speech editing
- You can select, delete, copy, and paste the text as normal.
- Pasted text will appear chronologically in the transcript (even if you paste text from Speaker A into a text box of Speaker B).
Advanced speech editing
- Press
.
to insert a pause/breath to split up a sentence.
- To insert a pause, type in a value and press the
insert pause
button - 
- To see to complete, original transcript, click on the speech library tab on the side of the window, or press
r
. You can copy, paste, delete in here and from here too.
- Press
e
or
to add an emphasis point after the current word. The current word is selected based on the cursor position in the text boxes.
Adding music
- Click the
Add Song
button in the local music library, and select an song (mp3 format) from your computer.
- Then click
Upload
. This will take some time, as the server needs to analyze the music to enable the music editing tools.
Music editing
- Press the plus button next to a song in the local Music Library to add it to the timeline. Songs in the timeline can be moved by clicking and dragging on the top bar. A song can be shortened by clicking and dragging on the song's left and right edges.
- If a song has been clipped to a short segment and a loop has been detected, click
to add a loop.
Adding musical underlays
- First, make sure the song you want to use is in the local Music Library but is not in the timeline. To remove a song from the timeline, click the
x
in the top-right corner of the track.
- Press
u
or click on an emphasis point in the timeline (
) to open the underlay creation dialog.
- Select a first (required) and second (optional) speech emphasis point.
- Select a song
- Press
Create
(this will be very fast for a single emphasis point; it will be quadratic in the length of the song for multiple change points)
Other shortcuts, features, and quirks
w
and s
move the cursor up and down between paragraphs in the text boxes.
- The
Music Volume
button allows for global adjustments to the music. This is a hack, but can be useful when generated underlays are too loud or too soft.
- Make sure to re-render after all changes!
- Press
to download the current composition as an mp3.
- Press
to start a new composition with one of the other speech tracks.
- The
Clear words
button clears all of the words from the timeline/transcript view. Sometimes it's nice to start fresh. If you do this, it's sometimes tricky to see where you can paste words; one of the two columns of the transcript view will still contain a text box! Hover right beneath the speaker names until you see the cursor change, then click and paste.
- Click the music browser tab on the right side of the window or press
f
to open the music browser.
- The emotion buttons filter the song table by emotion (coarsely). Once an emotion is selected, click it again to clear that filter.
- The features buttons toggle addition columns of the song table
- The play button for each song plays a clip centered around the a music change point in that song.
- Press
to filter by the song's nearest timbral neighbors. Press the x
in the red box to clear this filter.
- Press the plus button by a song to add it to your local music library.