---
title: WWDC2003 Session 003
framework: wwdc
role: article
path: wwdc/wwdc2003-003
---

# WWDC2003 Session 003

## Transcript

Kind: captions Language: en good afternoon welcome to the creating content for soundtrack and live type session soundtrack and live type are a couple of our applications that are part of our professional application products available from Apple specifically soundtrack and live type are part of the Final Cut Pro pro 4 bundle we'll be talking today about the process for actually creating content for these applications is one of the numerous developer opportunities that are available to help contribute to the the professional application set which also include things like plugins and workflow opportunities and driver development and such this is session is going to focus specifically on creating content for these two apps we're gonna start by talking a bit about live type and we'll get into a little bit later soundtrack soundtrack is the music creation application that's again part of a Final Cut Pro but to start let's let's get into life type life type as I mentioned is an application that's bundled as part of Final Cut Pro 4 it is basically our Pro video titling application what's unusual about live type is it's incredible capacity for doing animation and manipulating very sophisticated media and what we're going to talk about today is the content that live type uses and how you can actually create content to enhance the application and ways the opportunities you have for selling in into this particular customer base there's a number of different kinds of content supported by live type things we call active files which is kind of the high level conceptual container model for for this content which is built up of different kinds of content specifically textures which are if you will motion back or animated backgrounds typically objects which are similarly packaged but are also incorporate an alpha Channel capability basically would be used in conjunction with other material in the background or might be merged into some other video or other other material you may have and live fonts which is new technology that we've introduced which is the concept of having fonts that are actually fully animated movies where each glyph can have animation capability motion can be as you'll see made up of some very amazing footage or material to basically present text in a very very new way and another form of content that livetype incorporates is effects which is the ability then take all of this content that we've talked about and do very amazing things entire in terms of animation move it around on the screen make things fade come into play etc and lastly we have templates which are basically all of this material that's combined together into a form that can be packaged up so that users can actually build projects with it Indiana get into this and a lot more depth at I'm going to invite up Tom long Walker who's the product designer for life type and he'll give a brief demo and actually get into what this all means hello check check check glad y'all could be here today I'm always excited to talk about life type this is the world's only 3d or only application that will type 32-bit animated fonts it's a really exciting concept that Apple is developing here I like to think of live type and live fonts analogous to what system fonts were for the desktop publishing industry in the 80s live fonts are for digital media content creation and delivery the new 21st century standard font font standards and Apple owns a template apples bringing this technology forward and making it available for the masses and we have an excellent opportunity here to create content for it just by owning live type you have the ability to create live fonts and compile them into a create your own animations compile them into a life on and deliver them to the media hungry public royalty-free which is a very exciting brand-new merging market that we'd love to have you all be a part of so let me get you started with this application right here is the canvas this is where you do your composing for the text this is the inspector this is where you type in characters and also create and influence the attributes of the characters and in the media browser this is where the content comes from things like Brett was talking about textures objects effects and live fonts and then you have the timeline and that's where you can influence the timing for your composition so let me start by typing something out here the first thing you notice that's truly unique about this application is every one of these characters are drawn as an independent layer you have the ability to grab and compose rotate scale essentially control all the attributes available to you from the inspector on a character by character basis makes it very pleasurable to use not only are these independent layers but they're contained in a single track this single track is represented down here on the timeline and imagine having this many movies or animations eight different layers on a typical animation program it becomes very difficult to for instance control color and your timing considerations whereas we give you this all on a single track imagine if it were a sentence you end up with dozens and dozens of layers let me demonstrate how this works for attribute control if I were to just colorize for instance I can grab these character by character and apply color on a character by character basis take some interesting varied colors to work with here okay now any of these attributes that are available to me an inspector things like opacity blur scale offset rotate all of these I can apply on a character by character basis like fonts are essentially can be created from anything to take this bevel for instance is created in a 3d application you can do something with a hand-drawn font for instance things you can create in 3d or 2d applications this is creating a particle generator things that you can shoot with a video camera real world style fonts stop frame the high resolution film cameras for instance could be live fonts once I choose my font from the media browser I'm happy with it can demonstrate how this works every one of these characters are individual animations that are being drawn character by character well let's say I want to control the timing of this right now they're all triggering one at a time I have a timing tab that gives me the ability to set when these animations are triggered I can choose to trigger them randomly or in sequence I can sequence them from left to right or right to left I can control the the speed of it I can also loop them I can do hold first frame hold last frame things it would be a bit complex to do in any other application if you're dealing with all these layers at once now in addition to live fonts we also give you the ability to use system fonts just pick one here and something really great came out of our development as we were working for it with system fonts you also have the ability to control the system fonts on an individual character basis so that your composition is fun and easy you're not grabbing and grab these one at a time control their attributes now when it comes time to animate these the same with live fonts as with system fonts we offer this new concept of facts that are essentially modules with keyframes let me just pick an effect here lots to choose from simple matter of double clicking and this effect is applied to a track and that effect stays with the track you can apply as many effects as you like and just by simply clicking on it and hitting play I've created a fairly complex animation and obviously I can swap out my language however I like and it's just as easy to create effects from scratch let me demonstrate that so if I add a new effect let me scoot this first effect over just a little bit as an effect comes in from scratch I'm working with two keyframes to begin with the beginning and an ending keyframe and in the effects tab you'll see that I've got this new effect and I could call it anything I want so if I grab any character on here and start applying attributes to that keyframe let's start with the maybe an offset and a scale let me rotate it a little bit I can even give it a Bezier a motion path and as you see on the wireframe it gives me real-time updates of what I'm doing is I go along I think I want to give this an opacity change as well so that it starts with zero opacity and moves in full screen now what's interesting here you've seen the effects tab I've just applied four parameters to this keyframe that's a very unique concept in other applications you would see these broken down into four discreet tracks down in the timeline and then I would have to control those each for those and control where they occur in relation to each other and it gets awfully complex very quickly with this application it's all contained in a single keyframe now I could break these out into various effects if I want to if I want that level of control but for most cases I don't want to do that I want this nice clean timeline down here I have all of these parameters avail to me I can do things I can interpolate over time with shadow and glow and outline extrusion blur color you name it and the same kind of control that I have with live fonts in terms of timing I can also do with effect so I can randomly trigger those effects with each character or sequence it over time loop it so let me just set a bit of a random here and then hit play this will cash it into RAM and there was just a few clicks I've created a unique animation and I can choose if I like that effect that I just built I can choose to save that just come under saved save the effect put it in my own folder call it what I want give it a description and then it'll show up next time I need it in the effects browser so it's really handy if I'm starting on another project that effect that I built days ago I can bring up and apply it at any time now I like to think of this is a content delivery system we work with the media browser delivers effects objects textures and live fonts as Brett was saying textures are background elements meant to be used as either background or perhaps foreground layered elements but you can also put these textures inside of the text themselves lots to choose from but the idea is that this is the best delivery mechanism for the end user because while you can buy canned animations and stock animation this gives you the ability to create your own layers your own unique style you can colorize the textures before you apply your final touches to it you can also apply objects and those are the ones with alpha channels that are meant to be in between layers or on top of layers and of course you control that layer order so the end result ends up being something very specifically unique to your own project and it's easy to save this out and then apply it in a template just let that render for a minute okay so my color coordination may not be the best but you get the idea so I've got all these elements at play here and I can move them around with keyframe animation but with these effect modules so the combination of all this content is all nicely put together in a template if I were to save this project I can then apply this through the media or through the template browser and then call that up at any time and then swap out my new text with this template so it's an excellent way to deliver to the customer how you intended to use these live fonts and how your additional content such as objects and textures interplay together you can create a number of different styles and categories and themes that greatly reduces the amount of time of an animator or a video editor would you would need in order to create these from scratch but our primary purpose for being here is to talk about live fonts in the production thereof so I'm gonna ask Dave how the lead engineer for live type to come up and he's gonna get into more detail about how you make live fonts thanks time okay as Brett mentioned before the three main types of live type content are active files effects and templates and of active files there are three types there are textures objects and the live font and I'll go into how you make each one of these things first of all active files are actually a file pair they're there there's a active font proxy file and an active font data file AFP and AFD and the reason there are two types is that some users may not install all the content that you deliver they may not install the data a data file can be pretty large they can be a hundred megabytes if you've got a fonts a with a couple hundred characters and a and a few seconds 30 frames a second high resolution so they're separated out and they can be installed independently the proxy files are relatively compact they're compressed well and they contain all of the parameters that define a live phone although they don't contain all of the compressed frames they only contain one compressed frame for each glyph thanks so the simplest form of a live file is a active file is a texture the texture is just a it's basically a movie a 24-bit per pixel movie so anybody who has a library of texture movies can repurpose these and make live type content from them and there would be a viable product in itself just a collection of textures and it would enhance the application quite a bit the textures are high resolution they're full frame rate and they're typically used for background tracks as you saw Tom demonstrate and also for texture mattes so given a character you can texturize that and and basically mat to the texture with that character here's an example of a texture now an object is again it's it comes from a QuickTime movie you can use any QuickTime movie with an alpha channel to make an object and the main difference between that and a texture is that it contains an alpha Channel the Alpha Channel can be straight or it can be pre multiplied against white or black and again it's high resolution full frame rate and you typically use an object for lower thirds you can use it for the bar across the bottom you can use it as an accent like pixie-dust you can use it for a matte say a frame around your video and for any special effects like this now live file Live font is the new font format that we've developed and it's basically a collection of objects one for each glyph in a font so for the a very simple one you might just have the Roman alphabet and you may have just capital letters and for your own use that might be sufficient for the ones that we ship we have a full collection of 127 mac roman glyphs and they're similar to objects and the rest of their parameters you build a life on by using a font script and it's a simple command language that we developed for this and just a way of specifying all the parameters in a way that's easy to replicate and edit in a text editor it's it's not something that the normal user would would use although it is it ships with with with live type we have a font maker tool that's built into life type that you would use to build live fonts so I'll just quickly give you a feel for what the font script looks like although I won't go into detail on it really any of it I just want you to see one to see what what's involved in a font script has a few commands that specify the names of those source files and the destination files also you can specify what the name of the disk that you're going to destroy this is so that if if a user doesn't have it installed it will say a life live type will say please install the disk in in this case demo disk to install you tell the the font script what the flavor is you can have an again active font which is a live font or you can have texture or object as the argument there you tell it the Alpha type which is straight white or black you can give a description which shows up in a template browser and the these these two commands you see here the lower left and center are things that you'll measure out in a graphics application you'll find those two points as offsets from the lower left hand of each source movie now the next part is some spacing some horizontal spacing there's the width of a space that's just given because there is no actual source movie for a space character typically the there you can do you have timing information in these two there's whether or not the font can loop which is just two or false 0 or 1 and then there is a count of frames for intro frames loop and end and when you extend the length of a live font and duration on the timeline we loop the the loop portion here see the intro frames play first then you loop some number of times and then go to the end frames you specify the compression quality the RGB and alpha channels which are compressed separately to give you finer control over that and the source frame rate for the movies aspect ratio you may have rendered these you know you may have taken them from a DV camera and you may have 0.9 pixel aspect or you may have 1.0 if you came from a 3d rendering app or some Photoshop or another app and you also have a bunch of default settings that are stored with the live font and those are gone into in some detail in that user manual and finally for each glyph we we let you specify the source movie the characters that will be map stood moving and some numbers that I'll go into in a little detail here's an example of it we have a source movie for the letter A here and the letter A comes from a dot movie and the next two parameters are the advance width from that cliff until the next cliff when rendered out on that track and the the next one is the proxy frame index so you can have a you tell which proxy frame will be used if the font hasn't if the data file has not been installed yet there also some optional glyph parameters that you don't need to put into your script unless they're different from the lower left and center values found in the in the lower left and center commands your fonts grab so each glyph can have its own values for those now effects are pretty simply the they're the same as the effects that you build when you when you're running the app for your own use there's some tricks to preparing an effect for release to the public like making sure that the default timing values are going to show up right for any duration of track so if you've got something that's a fade out you'll want it to have a start time that's from the end not from the beginning so it'll show up always at the end of the track and in fact Tom went pretty much into the capabilities of that so I'll just skip over that but here's an example of how you might what it does and templates again Tom went over that it's just a saved project file with the description and it's something that the user defines in the template browser selects that edits the text and renders out his own movie into them so there's an example of one of the templates just simply with the text changed every rendered also when you're building live fonts effects and templates you're going to need a thumbnail movie that the user will see inside the template or effect or live font browser and the thumbnail movies are 160 by 120 movies there we've compressed however you want just dot movie files with the name specified from the font script and when you're building those you should use a template of your own you can make a thumbnail template that's just 160 120 it makes it easy to build down there's an example of what one might look like finally you'll find in in this user manual it says exactly where these things should be installed you'll probably want a ship an installer that puts these in the right place and on to design tips from Tom will show some give you some tips on creating these things now remember these are these are movies these are animations and so essentially all we're doing is putting these animations into a folder with this font script the day was talking about and then encrypting them into a single big data file now we it also has a proxy file as dave was referring to this is what you use to compose on the screen and when you're ready to render you use this big data file but the point being because you've got a lot of characters that you're creating movies for optimization is a key that's something that you want to focus on so what are the number of characters and when you're planning is is an issue for you Apple ship 127 characters we're striving to support English Spanish German and French so we contain all the special characters for accents and boom lots and and so on maximum point sized you're starting with an animation so the very largest size you work with is to be scaled down from there obviously you don't want to scale above that so that will affect your final file size and the size of the animation we recommend somewhere between 200 and 500 point depending on what you're shooting for for file size the number of frames that you use in the frame rate now this depends on the style and what you're working on typically for broadcast you'll want to work in 30 frames a second but that's not always the case if it's if it's something like the the cool font that you saw up there with the you can get away with 10 12 15 frames a second again this will lower the file size and as far as the number of frames that's the kind of thing that you want to optimize as much as possible I don't recommend going beyond 90 frames for your maximum animation length okay so for when you start this is essentially a matter of starting out with what project size you're gonna work in what resolution you're gonna work in let's say it's 900 by 900 need to keep that same resolution for every single glyph it's important to start with that lower-left point that dave is referring to and register all the characters to that lower-left point so that you have a common baseline and a common kerning point for every character now you can't override those in the glyph command but it's a much easier if you register them to begin with so you take a big character like a W and make sure that it fits your project size and establish your lower-left point from there characters with lower extenders like a lowercase G you would start with a you make sure that that lower-left accommodates that extender point looping does your animation loop character should loop we handle looping in two ways we do something really interesting for called segment looping here's an animation where the this is called the TV font and these these characters they they have three segments to them first they come up then they sit there and have an animated staticky screen for a period of time and then they go down so there are three segments to this animation when you build this you can define in the font script where your segment loop is where the center portion is so that when a user uses this and he wants this TV set to stay up for an extended period of time and he sets the loop value then it'll only loop that Center segment portion so it's a really intelligent way to loop and then there's also just a full loop there's an example of that where the beginning frame matches the ending frame simple loop and of course it's important to discover who your target audience is broadcast videos the way it's packaged right now but it's also great for multimedia and web I think people are finally discovering or just now discovering since it's a new application that this works in keynote and keynote might mean lower resolution depending on where you're going with it broadcast is typically 30 frames a second and in high resolution you can also go to web and of course web you want to keep it down to 10 12 15 frames a second and also print is a possibility I've made a life fonts before that are 500 point very high res single frame that amount to 4 Meg's when I'm done for the entire font which is pretty cool and then of course the style of the font you use font like fonts are a new animal and it's important to recognize how they should be used I don't want to see pages and pages of live fonts being used I want to see them used as it as a metaphor for a statement or at least that's the way I think they should be used they can be combined with system fonts and then just use them sparingly in order to make it out that push that point for the for the audience and here's just some examples of the metaphors that I have in mind so with that I think that concludes what we're what we're able to talk about today in this short period of time and I hope you could make life on thanks for being here Xander Xander Xander Soren I am the product manager for soundtrack and we're gonna get up here and make a little bit of noise for you so soundtrack is part of final cut for and it's it allows you to create original royalty-free music and does this in a really cool way because it lets you use pre-recorded musical performances and what that means is that you don't necessarily have to be a musician this is great for video editors because they can take somebody else's performances and they can combine them together the thing about other people's performances is that they weren't necessarily recorded to sound good together like one could have been like a drum beat recorded in LA at a slower tempo another thing could have been a piano recorded in New York so what soundtrack does is in real time it will match them together so all of a sudden you don't need to know about all these technical things you get to just go and say you know I want some drums here I want a saxophone so again it's all done in real time and it supports a variety of really popular file formats including AI up and wave which are uncompressed and don't have any metadata so there's no way for it to really know what the tempo or the key is so soundtrack is actually able to infer what the tempo is of these loops and is able to guess really most the time really accurately and combine tempos of AAF and WAV now there is also a file format called acid now the acid file format also gives you a couple pieces of metadata that makes it easier to match loops and that is the the key as well as the tempo so soundtrack recognizes acid files and there's their libraries of hundreds of acid files available in the market for example for $60 you can basically buy mick fleetwood and have mick fleetwood playing royalty free on your session which is really really cool but what we're here to talk to you about today is a brand-new file format called Apple loops and I'll tell you a little bit about what they are and how you can create them and and there's our we think a great market for creating Apple loops for soundtrack so Apple loops are based on AI F and it adds some metadata to it so this is used not only for matching the loops but also for searching them because one of the really cool things that soundtrack lets you do is it lets you find files really quickly and that becomes important soundtrack has about 4,000 loops that ships with it and it's very easy to add additional loops you know the third-party libraries so it'll be quite common for people to have 40,000 loops be able to find them is really really important so the the chunks that are included in an AI F to make an apple loop are author and copyright information to assign ownership the beats which is used to infer what the tempo is as well as the time signature since soundtrack supports different time signatures that's embedded within the file the musical key as well as the scale type if you look at other file formats like acid it'll have the actual key but there's nothing that tells you whether that lets say a piano part was in a minor and then you have a guitar solo that was in a major they both kind of matched to that key but they don't sound good together and a lot of non musicians don't know why that is so we've taken it to the next step when we've added major and minor information so you can filter down and things just sound better for you a few other important things that we've added which really bring out the power of the search engine is genre instrument and then a whole bunch of these mood descriptors so you can what will kind of go over the different mood descriptors but if you just say that you want an instrument to be find as relaxed and acoustic and maybe it has some processing on it we have a bunch of descriptors which which allow you to assign value to that and finally transient markers what's what's happening in the application is all your audio is being stretched it's either being sped up or it's slowed down and that involves samples and bits being taken out or added to the audio file so you want to do that to the right place you want to make sure that you are you know taking samples out from a place that doesn't have a lot of active musical information and transient markers allow you to protect the areas and you'll be able to see really clearly in your waveform which areas you want to avoid for that so with that why don't I give you a little demo of sound track so you can see kind of the loops in action then we'll actually go ahead and show you how you create the loops okay so we're in soundtrack here and you can see in this area here we have the media manager we switch to the other okay there's the media manager that I was talking about okay so the first thing we want to do is this is part of the the final clip or package so a lot of people are working with video primarily to start out and then you add music to your video so what I do is I go into this directory structure and I have basically a shortcut to my home directory and here's a QuickTime file that I drag in and this is kind of the old way of going and finding your file now that's fine with my video in this case I'm actually going to create a little cycle region here so I can get the video playing in the background but if I've got 40,000 loops and I want to go and find a specific drum that I'm looking for this is not the way you want to do it so we built a search engine which makes it really really easy and it leverages all these tags that are in the asset loops so you can see we have a bunch of keyword buttons here and this one's kind of a grab-bag of a bunch of different instruments here you can see like cinematic rock and blues urban some different genres and then a few different descriptors and again that's just one page of many different ways that you can access key words including a custom page so you can define your own but we'll stick with this kind of assortment and in this case I want to find a drum so I click on drum and you'll notice that I get about 950 drums we have over almost a thousand drums that just shipped with the application that's still a lot to go through so fortunately I can use these keywords and combinations to find exactly what I'm looking for in this case I will say that I want something that's fairly relaxed so I'll combine that and now I've got drums and relaxed and a much more manageable list but I want something that has a little bit more of a modern feel so I know if I type the word dance now this refined search field what refine search lets you do is type in a word that will actually be found either in the file name or the entire directory path so it's another really powerful way of Zoning and to find the exact content that you want in this case I'll type the word dance and I get a whole bunch of electronic club dance beats now the cool thing is I can just click on one of these some audio coming in there and I'm kind of previewing them against my composition if you just wanted to kind of make a mental note here you can see the tempo and all these tags are identified it's a drum so it doesn't have any key information so we have 130 bpm drum group going here and I'll just drag that into the composition now because this is a loop I can just drag out kind of as much or as little as I want and you can see the length of the loop is pretty easily defined by this this little indentation and I've just filled that to my video and now I have drums going through the entire composition but it's also very easy to add additional instruments even again ones that weren't designed to sound good together so I'll actually click off of relaxed and in this case I want something that is acoustic so I'll make it acoustic and in this case I'll type the word funk in my refine search field and I have a bunch of these funk master kids I noticed these tempos are 110 which is completely different than the 130 that we first heard so I'll drag that in and you'll hear that they they're played in sync and the other thing you notice is that the icons are different because the the musical instrument is one of the tags sound track knows to assign the appropriate icon in this case an electronic drum kit in this case something that was more of an electronic beat and there are a lot of different instruments and these are all brought up by the TAT so let me quickly get a couple more instruments in here so we can we can see some of the other power of the app will go into synthesizers and I want to just work in the key of minor so I wanna make sure everything fits together in the you know minor loops I'll go ahead and play this composition let's try a couple different sounds because here's a little synthesizer that's in the key of C and I'll drop it and I'll just get one more instrument going here I will click on cinematic and issue the since and now here's one in G so I'll bring that in and it still fits so again you don't have to know anything about music or what keys work or what tempos work soundtrack kind of does that for you and it does it all in real time the other really amazing thing is because that's all in real time you have this unprecedented flexibility to be able to say well I want to hear all this stuff faster so you just take the tempo slider and now it's all faster I can take it all and just make it slower you can hear even though it's substantially slower now I'm down to like 90 beats per minute when some of the loops were we're at 130 it's preserving the audio quality and it's doing that because of the transient marker assignments that I'll be showing you in a little bit and the final thing I'll show you here is that all the keys are being matched to a project key of a and I can very easily just change it all until it's a the key of G don't change it again and back of him - and it does that all in real time instantly - all the loops so that's just a little bit of an overview of how sound track handles all these Apple loops and now let's show you how to go ahead and create your own ok so creating Apple loops a few things we're going to cover is the actual recording and editing of them the tagging and adding transient markers to the loops and then some things you can do in the naming and directory structure and then finally just some quick things you can do to test your loops and make sure that you you did the right job so when it comes to recording soundtrack supports really really high resolution audio up to 24-bit 96 kilohertz resolution most of the content out there is at CD quality which is at 16-bit 4401 so there's an opportunity to deliver a really really high quality audio to people that are looking for high quality audio loops like most other production environments audio is follows the garbage in garbage out model the the audio you're going to get at the end is only as good as what you put in so the the quality of the connectors becomes really important the input chain if you've got a fan blowing in the room those are all going to make it into your final mix so make sure that you have as good of an input changes you can have from the beginning and that carries into whether your instruments are in tune or not so you most of the content out there is tuned to an a 440 so you want to make sure that you're in tune with the rest of the world and even over a session guitars fall out of tune really quickly so it's good to keep up on that the other thing is when you develop your content it's important to play to a really really steady click or a steady drumbeat that doesn't have a lot of sway and a lot of a lot of excessive feel because you want to keep things fairly on the beat because you're not necessarily trying to match the field to the things that you're working on you're trying to match the feel of your content to the rest of the world and in loop based music most of it is fairly straight now you can add feel later and there are things you can do in your project but for the most part you want to make sure things are really really steady and finally it really pays to be organized and to to keep a recording log of all your performances if you're if you're sitting there and playing a guitar and you have 30 different takes and they're in a variety of keys it's so helpful to know that when you actually have to go and tag them and define what those those keys are so in terms of editing what you want to do is you're gonna have a long track probably 30 different guitar takes and you want to start cropping and trimming it down into the final loops a lot of great waveform editors out there there's one in logic spark and final cut for includes an application called peak Express from bias which is also a fantastic way of trimming down loops so what you want to do is find that perfect looping region and you establish that and the best kind of test is to close your eyes and you know try some different tweaks and get that start and end point and you really want to make it so when you close your eyes and you kind of tap out a tempo you just don't hear where the brake is you kind of forget where the the beginning and end was and that's kind of you'll know at that point you're you're fairly successful in creating a good loop but the second part of that is you want to make sure that the beginning and end are happening at a zero crossing so you want to make sure that the waveform is actually crossing the zero line of the the x-axis and if you have one that's kind of at the top of the waveform and then one that's at the zero you're gonna have pops and clicks the reality is that sometimes you get that perfect timing and the zero crossings aren't where that where you want them and that's where you'd want to use actually a manual destructive you can do a fade at the beginning and a fade-out at the end and that'll force it to kind of begin and end at a zero crossing on the last thing is since you're probably recording a lot of different instruments maybe a different volume levels it's a safe last step to just do a normalization so that everything you have is kind of at a consistent volume level so tagging to sign the metadata it's the AF I look at all these things that we have to do you've got author copyright beats and time signature musical key scale type genre instrument mood descriptors the transient markers and ultimately file name that's a lot of work so how are we going to do this well we created an application for you to make this really really easy called the soundtrack loop utility and we built this in conjunction with a lot of people that were doing this for years that were you know professionally doing content production so we learned a lot of things about about what people are looking for when they're when they're tagging their loops they need to be able to batch convert a lot of files at a time or possibly even run the entire thing off of a keyboard instead of a mouse there's a lot of content developers that are getting carpal tunnel so we built an application that makes it really really easy to work with that kind of a stressful production environment so I will actually jump in and give you a quick demo of the soundtrack loop utility as you can see this in action okay so the first thing the soundtrack loop utility asks me for is what files do I want to work with and as a mission before you can work with single or multiple files in this case to start out I'm just going to go ahead and select this this whole list of files and I've got these different organs and I can go ahead and I can preview them [Music] so in this case I want to work on this this one jazz guitar riff so I've selected that and now I have the ability to assign all the different parameters to it well I know it's not it's a loop so I'm checking on loop a one-shot is it would be an apple loop Apple loops file that doesn't get stretched so if you have a cymbal hit or a spoken-word there are times where you don't want it to actually stretch like a loop so you enable that as a one-shot in this case it's a loop it is eight beats right now the key I happen to know is in the key of D so you sign that there and it's also major then you can assign the time signatures you can see there's some author and copyright information and even some kana there's a comment field so you can either make some internal notes or if you just want to say for more information go to my website you know that kind of thing then we have the ability to sign John row we put some really really basic big buckets for genre we could all argue about the the 30 different plate subgenres of electronic music so we just basically kept it fairly fairly vague as far as rock blues electronic jazz just to kind of accommodate the the largest genres so in this case that was a jazz loop and it was an electric guitar so I click on guitar and I have a whole bunch of different choices here and then you can see here we have all these different descriptors that we can assign and I'm actually going to go ahead and turn on keyboard tagging because again this whole application can be driven by keyboards and I can listen to the loop [Music] so when I listen it it's a it's a single instrument it's not an ensemble and I'm going in and I'm just typing keys it's a part not a fill it's electric it's dry it's clean it's kind of cheerful and it's relaxed and it grooves and its melodic so really really easy to just go ahead and assign those and then I would just say about the file and then all that information would be embedded and we have an apple loop as a tagged AI F other thing that a lot of people a lot of content developers need to do is they need to work with the content they already have because they want to add all this additional rich data let's say to their existing AF or their acid files so we allow you to select let's say there is a whole bunch of acid eyes duay files and i just batch selected the whole thing as you can see the key actually came in from the the loops as well as all the other of the copyright information so it was very easy to say okay my scale type for this is these are minor loops and it's a it's an organ in this case so and then I go ahead and I'd save that out and it would create a whole new set of the AF files one thing that I won't actually go back to this guitar riff and show you how transient muckers are assigned so by clicking on the transient tab I'm going to intentionally go to kind of a wrong setting here I'm going to switch to transient markers happening at whole notes and we'll play this loop through you can t see there's some weird delay happening and the more I stretch this loop so there's some weird stuff happening in there and that's because the transients are in the right aren't not in the right place so I want to make the transient divisions go to quarter notes because it seems like there's more happening there and it seems like it could even maybe benefit from eighth notes that's too many let's go with quarter notes and then I have a sensitivity fader so it'll actually help line up you can see that the transients are now like popping to the beginning of the the major transient events where I don't want the stretching to occur so it's most of it is pretty automatic and you can kind of use sensitivity to Zone in to where you want to go and I can see this one's a little bit off so I can move it maybe I want to add a point right here and drop in a couple it's always good when you have a trail to add quarter notes in between and we'll get one more in here and hear what that sounds like so it's basically it's playing it a lot faster than its original tempo which was this but because the temp of these transient markers were properly defined I now have a good-sounding loop that stretches well so that's kind of the the soundtrack loop utility in a nutshell and we'll go back and just wrap up a couple more production tips so when it comes to naming and directory structure the thing that we really encourage is to this is the opportunity to be more descriptive than you would be inclined to be if you're a whole bunch of guitars if you name them guitar oh one guitar oh - you're gonna the same file names as thousands of other loops on the market so down-home Delta blues guitar would be a much much better name the other thing is that refine search field not only uses the file name uses the whole directory path so if I actually had a folder called Xander Sauron and then inside of that I had Delta blues or if I'd strumming within that I could type any of those words within sound track in the refine search field and those loops would come up so that's again an opportunity to provide the users with with additional ways of finding your loops so finally you've created these these loops using the soundtrack loop utility best way of testing the loop to see if it works is drop it back into sound track one of the first things you'll see right away is if an instrument icon pops up you know you're at least kind of going in the right direction so checking the icon is kind of the first telltale thing and then you probably want to make sure that the rhythm works with with your other content that's in the project so we recommend having a really really straight and straight steady drumbeat like an electronic drum and if you're finding the loop is either just not looping writers drifting back and forth probably needs a little bit of attention and then finally since you have the ability to sign key and then major and minor it's very helpful to have let's say a major and a minor organ or a pad or some kind of a loop that you can drag in and test your loops out against and and see if they sound good and then the final thing that that would be good to test against is there's an additional info field like you saw that media manager that we had at the bottom there's a disclosure triangle that gives you even more information about the loop and you'll see all the tag and the copyright information within that so then you'll know if the the file received it all correctly so getting started you guys all look really anxious to get out there start recording and creating your own Apple loops so we've developed an SDK for you it includes the soundtrack loop utility as well as documentation for that app and a separate application which talks of much deeply to all the topics I was talking to today again working with content producers to talk about the things that were important to them and the things that you can do to really optimize your loops as well as a few different sample loops we have examples that you can go through and each different loop type has different ways or strategies of assigning transient markers to make sure that they sound really good and that is all I'm told going to be available by the end of the week on the Developer connection site so we hope you guys all go out there and start making some great Apple loops for us you