On the Right Track(s)

Burli has been supporting digital audio for so long, we sometimes forget to mention that we have one of the best Multi Track Audio Editor tools in the industry, and it’s all ours!

We know we have very healthy competition out there who do some amazing things with their Audio tools.  But our custom Editor is one of the tools that stand out when we talk about how our software is built with a very particular user in mind.

For Journalists, By Journalists

Burli’s Editor was custom built by our team – and we understand what tools and techniques are needed first and often by journalists.  And at the same time, we recognize that not all the tools available on the market today really have a place in journalistic workflow – do you really need a deeply complex and expensive audio suite to do a top and tail, adjust your levels, and layer a couple of tracks?

The Multi Track Editor is useful for creating multi-layered audio projects, with overlapping dialogue, music, effects, and other background sound.  The Editor offers:

• Effectively unlimited tracks
• RMS and peak normalization
• Volume envelope controls
• Preset fades
• Support for virtually any VST or LADSPA plugins

That’s just a handful of our features, but there’s lots more than we can cover here.  Let’s start learning about some of these particular features!

Many Tracks, Many possibilities

One of the first things we point out about the Editor is that you can use what amounts to an unlimited number of tracks, and they take next to no effort to set up.

In Burli Newsroom, open up a new Multi Track project, and you’ll see this:

Start pressing the ‘+’ key (next to the Backspace key) and you immediately start laying in new tracks:

We’ve gone from the default of three to five tracks in just a couple of key presses, and we’re just getting started.  Of course, for journalism purposes, we rarely require more than a few tracks (music bed, a couple of dialogue tracks, perhaps a sound effect track or two), but you can add as many as you like.  Take them away with the ‘-‘ key.

Drag and drop audio in from any source available in Burli (in any format) and before you know it, you’ve got a complex interview package ready to go (we’ve skipped a few steps here, but this shows you what kind of project you can build).

The Loud and Soft of It

So now we’ve added a (single) audio sample to a new project, but we can see at a glance it’s pretty quiet… the green waveform is not very strong.

We can simply Normalize the entire sample with a double click on the block and selecting our Normalization type (Peak or RMS) and we get much more useful results.

And if we want even finer control, we can engage the Envelope control mode, and start manually adjusting certain parts louder and softer.

Click the Envelope button (see the orange arrow), and you can immediately start dragging the red line up and down, making the track louder and softer.  You can see the first part above has been made louder, followed by a long fade.  These adjustments can be made down to the individual frame level – very fine control!

Simple, Fast, and Powerful

Most everything you can accomplish in the Editor can be done with just a couple of clicks of the mouse or key presses.  There’s no hunting through endless menus for that one, particular command or specific filter.

We offer quick and easy ways to change your track’s title, zoom in and out, select audio (and easily refine that selection), anchor samples together, copy, cut, paste… the list goes on.

Once you’re finished, mixing everything down to a single track is a one-click step.  Turn this…

…into this…

…in one click!  Your original work is preserved, and you get a mixed down new track in your personal folder, ready to go to air!

Sound Decisions

We know journalists don’t have all day to mess around with the tools, they just want to get the job done and move on to the next thing.

This article barely scratches the surface of our Multi Track Audio Editor – it’s fast, flexible, and perfectly suited to journalists’ needs, but still full featured and very deep.  Feel free to contact us to learn more!

Visit us at www.burli.com for more info, or email us to get in touch.