Audio Design Desk 2.0 Launches: New Features and Workflows
Sound design plays an essential role in every great movie. It locks in with the film’s score and character dialogue, forming an emotional layer that supports the events on screen.
Without the right audio, even visually stunning content will fall flat. That’s why creators need an application that can solve both audio procurement and arrangement in a single workspace.
Audio Design Desk (ADD 2.0) is an award winning digital audio workstation (DAW) used by content creators, filmmakers, and sound designers. It leverages AI and real-time editing to simplify the sound design process.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the exciting new features and enhancements that make ADD 2 an essential tool for video editors and audio professionals alike.
Sign up for a free 30-day trial of ADD 2.0
Introducing ADD 2: 75,000+ music cues and sound effects
Licensing high-quality music, foley, and sound effects used to be expensive and difficult.
Over the past ten years, there’s been a booming demand for royalty-free audio, which has in turn given rise to major libraries like Envato, Artlist, Epidemic, and SoundStripe.
These platforms solves some problems, like finding the right sound through phrase searching and filtered metadata. But the time it takes to access and place each file on the project’s audio time line could still use improvement.
We’ve developed a two-part solution at Audio Design Desk, making it incredible easy to position sounds from any library.
Our own audio collection includes 75,000+ studio-quality music and sound effects. However, our Media Bridge panel also grants users direct access to all the major third party audio libraries. So you can search through the libraries of your choice, from the convenience of your workstation.
What’s new in Audio Design Desk 2?
Audio Design Desk 2 comes packed a variety of new features, all designed to streamline your music editing and mixing process.
SnapCut is a brand new tool for editing music cues in ADD. Stop zooming in on your timeline and stressing out trying to trim waveforms at just the right moment. The BPM of every music file is automatically detected, so all you’ve got to do is click and position the playhead on grid.
Split files on their downbeat, extract your favorite moments, and rearrange them based on the energetic arc of your video. ADD’s magnet edge detector snaps audio clips together like LEGO blocks, so they flow seamlessly from one moment to the next.
Element Detector helps automate the process of chopping stems into elements and adding markers. Drag an untagged recording into Element Detector to get started. Right away you will see that it identifies audio attributes in the file.
This tool lets you remove unwanted silence between sounds when chopping elements in a stem, if you desire. You can also chop elements without any audio being removed. You can also choose to have Sync Markers, which is a really handy feature for sharp transient/peak sounds like footsteps, impacts and rises.
Timeline Quicklinks: Download audio files from licensed, third-party providers like Epidemic, Artlist, and SoundStripe. Then drag one of those files into the ADD audio timeline to reveal the Quicklink Toolbar. Use this to build metadata, access element detector, and more!
Auto Gain uses ADD’s content-aware timeline to automatically adjust gain levels for an audio element. This results in a balanced first draft of a mix. Create mixes based on LUFS standards, ranging from television and radio to digital streaming and social media. You can even create your own auto-level presets.
ADD’s exclusive Native Extensions have evolved beyond just Frame.io to include now Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve and Epidemic Sound. It’s the only DAW in the world that gives users direct access to powerful features through the official APIs of these tools.
Media Bridge has been improved to help users connect to and use the stock media services and websites they love and trust the most.
The Replacement engine was entirely rebuilt to make ADD more aware of the intentions behind user sound selections, making replacing and refining soundscapes faster, easier and more satisfying than ever before.
We’ve redesigned Custom Triggers and improved Search features means you can find and place the sounds you need faster, and have them saved just the way you want them for future projects.
Our new Importer Engine autotags your personal collection of sounds and music cues faster, with even more accuracy.
Sign up for ADD 2 with a free trial
You can sign up for a free trial here and download ADD with 3,000 royalty-free audio files to get started. Upgrade to a paid plan to access the full 75,000 files collection!
We’ll be rolling out a new Sounds app in the near future, granting direct access to all of the audio files in our collection. You’ll be able to license individual tracks from your browser, without ever opening your DAW.
Here’s a sneak peek at what the Sounds app looks like:
