Jaytrax

The Sample Editor

The sample editor is the place where you can edit and load sounds which won't be generated in realtime called samples.

Visualising the sound

The big sample display is probably the most important part of the Sample Editor. The display gives a representation of the audio data of the sample. Just like the waveforms in the previous screens, a sample too is a series of fluctuations around an horizontal axis. The sample is a representation of the movement of the speaker cone in time when it plays that sound. Let's look at the display in detail to carefully explain what you can read of of it. The white line is the actual sample. In our example the sample is a sinewave which rapidly changes amplitude. The vertical blue line in the beginning is the sample starting point. This is the point Jaytrax will start playing when it has to play the sample. The vertical red line is the sample ending point. When the sample reaches this point it either stops or it continues at the sample looppoint which is displayed as the vertical yellow line. To place thesde lines you can either change the 'Startpoint', 'Looppoint' or 'Endpoint' values or you can click one of those buttons and right click anywhere in the display. The corresponding value will then be set. With the 3 dropdown boxes under the display you can easily set the start-, end- or looppoint to a fraction of the total length. This is very easy if you have a long sampled beat which you want to cut up into smaller subbeats. With the slider just under the display you can scroll through the sampledata if you are looking at a magnification. If you drag through the display with your leftmouse button down, you can select a range in the sample. On this selection you can perform operations like cut/paste and zooming. Other ways to change your current selection are the 'Select None' button which disables any selection you might have. The 'Select All' button selects the entire sample. The 'Select Loop' button selects that bit of the sample between the loop- and endpoint. The 'Select Previous' button selects the selection you have used for a previous operation. After selecting a range we can specify what we want to do with it. If you click 'Show Range' the display will zoom in on the sample and show exactly the bit you had selected. Selecting 'Show All' resets the display and shows the entire sample. Clicking the 'Zoom In' and 'Zoom out' buttons let's you gradually zoom in and out on the sampledata. The 'Cut' button removes the selected range out of the sample and stores it in the clipboard. The 'Copy' button only makes a copy of the selection which it will also stop in the clipboard. The 'Paste' button pastes the contents of the clipboard to wherever you had set your selection. If your selection was only one line think, the contents will be inserted. If you had specified a selection, the selected region will be changed with the contents of the cliboard. Clicking 'Zero' empties the selected range of the wave. Setting a range to zero effectively kills the signal there. The 'Mix in' button does the same as paste but it doesn't rplace the sample with the clipboard sample but it mixes it in. The ratio with which the clipboard sample and the original are mixed can be specified with the 'Mix factor' value. The 'Reverse' button can reverse the selected range. The 'Average' buttons averages out peaks and noises in the selected range. Averaging removes a lot of high frequencys in the process and if you average long enough you will only be left with a low frequency wave. The 'Amplify' button amplifies the selected range with the percentage set in the field next to it. If you amplify a sample too much, clipping will occur and the sample will sound deformed. After having manipulated the sample you can specify how Jaytrax should behave when playing the sample. Normally the sample will only be played once. It will start at the Startpoint, and end when it reaches the Endpoint. When you set the 'Looping enabled' toggle, Jaytrax will continue playing the sample from the specified Looppoint after it reaches the Endpoint. It will do so indefinately. When you also specify the 'Bidirectional Looping' Jaytrax will bounce hence and forth between the Loop- and the endpoint. If you try and specify a Looppoint you will quickly learn that this is quite tricky to place one so that you won't hear where the sample loops. Jaytrax has some utility functions to help you with your task. First of all you can Click one of the 'Search Looppoint' buttons to search for the first available probable looppoint to the left or right. A probable looppoint is where the Endpoint and the Looppoint are at an equal point in a wave. If you can't find a proper loooppoint, you can aslo force one by recalcualting a bit of the sample so that it should loop better. This can be done by hitting the 'Make Looppoint' button. This option will recalculate X samples roundabout the endpoint, so that it will loop better. The value for X can be specified in the 'Nr of samples' box. Finally when you're  through manipulating the sampled data you can save the sample with the 'Save Sample' button. The load Sample allows you to load previously saved sample data back into the program. Jaytrax only allows 16 bit mono .WAV files. Some subtypes of WAV are not supported. The 'Delete Sample' removes the sample from memory, this way, Jaytrax will resume using the synthesized sounds instead of sampled data. The 'Samplelength' box gives the amount of bytes used to store your sample in memory. The 'Samplename' is the name of the sample on disk. Last but not least there is a dropdown box called: 'Share sampledata from instrument'. Sample sharing is the ability to use the sampledata of another instrument. This is very usefull if you want to use the same sampledata but with other characteristiques, like the volume setting or different looppoints. Reloading of the sample would not be very efficient, thus you can select with the dropdownbox the instrument whoms sampledata you will use. Please note that if you start editing the shared sampledata, the original sampledata will be edited as well! If you select 'Delete Sample' however you will only disable the samplesharing and you will get your old sample back.

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