Quantising audio

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

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 means dragging beatmarkers over the audio track to tell Disguise software 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 Disguise software.

  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.

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.

The quantiser contains further editing options.

To open the Quantiser menu:

  1. 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.