Editor

General

The editor has several windows (more about using them below). The project explorer gives an overview about the project you edit. Here, you can add or remove elements. In the music and sound explorers you select files. There are also windows for messages and volumes. Finally, there are windows to edit the elements, e.g. a music playlist.

All operations which change the project can be undone with the usual buttons or the menu.

Project Explorer

In the project explorer, you define the modes and their elements (see the model description). You mainly work with the context menu here. Whenever you right-click on an element, there will be a menu with with you can e.g. rename it, add sub-elements, or define a key for the element. With drag & drop, you can reorder elements, copy them (with Ctrl) or create links (with Ctrl + Shift).

On top of the project explorer, there are a few buttons to play a sub-element (for a 'preview' to test how it sounds), to stop that playing, and to define a key for an element.

Music and Sounds Explorer

These windows show the folders and files where the sounds and music are stored. If you edit a playlist, you can drag files with the mouse from the explorer to the playlist. With a double click you can play a file.

There are also some buttons at the top here: to play / stop, and to reread the file list after copying new files to the disk. With a context menu, you can also start an external editor for a file (e.g. Audacity). At the bottom, there is a panel with information about the selected file: how long it is, and where it is used in the project. You can use the i-button to hide and show that panel.

In the music explorer, you can also define Tags for music files and filter the shown files with the tags.

Tags

For the tags, there are two windows. One is used to set tags for selected files (you open it from the context menu of the music explorer) and the other one is used to manage and translate the known tags. Both are described in more detail here.

Other Windows

In the Volumes window, you can select the volumes for playing like in the Player or the Controller. These volumes are only for the computer and are not saved with the project.

The Project Errors window shows a warning e.g. if files on the disk are not found any more or if you have defined the same key for two modes. With a double click on a message, you can jump directly to the element in the project explorer which caused the warning.

Window Management

You can reorder the windows in the main window of the editor with drag & drop; you just have to drag a window on its title bar. A blue rectangle shows where the window will be placed if you drop it. Some buttons will also appear in the middle; if you drop the window on one of the buttons, you can also select where it will be placed. If you put several windows in the same place, they will be shown there with tabs.

With a double click on a title bar you can turn a window to a 'floating' window. Then, you can also drag it out of the main window. Another double click fixes the window again. With the pin button in the title bar, you can also hide the window; instead of the window, only a button will be shown. If you move the mouse over the button, the window is shown again. If you click on the pin button again, the window will again be visible always. Finally, you can also hide the window completely (and show it again) with the 'View' menu.

Editors

You open element editors with a double click on an element in the project explorer. The editors usually have general settings in the upper part and a list with sub-elements in the lower part. You can drop files from the music or sound explorer there. A double click on a sub-element opens another editor for that element, and a right-click opens a context menu.

In the editor for files, you can select another title for the file. By default, the title will be read from an mp3-tag or calculated from the file name. You can also choose effects for the file and you can play it with 'Test'.

Element Start

If you select 'Start...' in the context menu of a mode element, a special editor is opened. There, you can (also) select the key, and the editor shows whether the key will start the element once or whether the element will run forever until the key is pressed again. Further, you can define whether music is stopped when the element is started (which is always the case if the element starts some music itself) and whether other sounds shall be stopped.

If music and / or sounds shall be stopped, you can also select that the old ones shall be faded out. For sounds, this only concerns those which run in an endless loop, like it is typical for background sounds (wind, waves, crickets, ...). For music, the new music is also faded in, or you can select that old and new music shall be cross-faded. If music is crossfaded, however, you can't fade out sounds because otherwise it wouldn't be clear when the new element shall be started (directly to fade in the new music or only after the sounds have been stopped?).