eisenkraut introduction

design goals

a simple but comfortable sound editor with support for multichannel audio and floating point encoding. the editor is to be reduced to its core function, and a document corresponds to a sound file, multitrack arrangement is not to be confounded with sound file cutting and is left to other applications.

in the longterm, the idea is to fuse eisenkraut and fscape (operating fscape from the process menu) and to build a robust supercollider client environment around it.

how to operate it

eisenkraut is a multi-document application. each soundfile represents one document, which is generated by choosing File->Open..., dragging soundfiles onto the eisenkraut icon or double clicking soundfiles in the finder, if eisenkraut is made the default soundfile application. accepted formats are aiff, wave, ircam, au/snd. note however that there is not a 100% congruency between eisenkraut and supercollider, so you might not be able to play back ircam sound files for example.

when opening a new soundfile, first of all the overview waveform is created. if you open files repeatedly, the overview calculation can be speed up by activating waveform caching, which will remember the waveforms of the recently used files.

editing is straight forward. on the top of the document frame, there is an editing and a transport toolbar. to edit your sound by cutting and pasting, select the pointer tool from the timeline toolbar first. press the mouse and drag to make a selection. shift+click to extend selection.

Some more useful shortcuts are: ctrl+click to position insertion / playback point independant of the selection. double-click or spacebar to start playback. meta+click to select all. to scroll to the selection start / end, type cursor left and right. to zoom in or out, press ctrl+left and right. to zoom vertically, type cursor up and down. see the shortcuts document for more available keyboard accelerators.

all channels of a soundfile are displayed vertically with timeline axis in horizontal direction as you expect from a classical sound editor. the display shows peak and rms energy (separately for positive and negative halfwave) in two different grey shades. when you zoom in, there will be a point when view switches to sample level display.

during editing you may often want to activate blending. (diamond shaped icon from the toolbar). blending will apply crossfades to editing operations, for example to avoid clicks when cutting.

to save your file, press meta+s. to save under a new name, choose save-as from the file menu. a rather strange dialog will pop up showing the current path name and format. to browse the harddisk, click on the small list symbol right to the path name.

sound playback

to actually hear your sound when running the transport, supercollider server needs to be running. you will want to set the preferences to automatically boot supercollider when eisenkraut is launched (audio preferences). for the first time, start supercollider manually: go to the main window. press boot and wait, until the button's text changes to "terminate". if you encounter an error, check the following things:

to control the master volume, you can use the gain slider in the control room window (accessible from the window-menu). this is useful for very silent sounds or for floating point files which go way above 0 dBFS, in which case you can turn down the volume, until playback is undistorted. you might also want to use the limiter in the control room window for sound files that go above 0 dBFS.