Copyright © 2008-2023 MultiMedia Soft How to use the control in your projects

First of all let us say that if this guide should not be clear to you, feel free to contact our support team for any doubt or curiosity you may have: we usually answer all of our customers questions in less than 24 hours. Note that the purpose of this guide is to give a taste of the main features available inside Active Sound Editor.

 

As an integration to this guide some example of use of this component, in Visual Basic 6 and Visual C++ languages, can be found inside the "Samples" folder: if during the setup phase you left the installation directory to its default, you will find them inside "\Program files\MultiMedia Soft\Active Sound Editor\Samples".

 

The first needed step is to add the control to your project: see the Adding the control to a project section for details.

 

Before starting sound editing management, the component needs to be initialized: for this purpose it's mandatory a call to the InitEditor method; the best place to call this initialization method is usually the container form initialization function: for example, when using Visual Basic 6, it will be the Form_Load subroutine or, when using Visual C++, it will be the handler function of the WM_INITDIALOG Windows message. The main purpose of calling the InitEditor method is to synchronize the component with its container form.

 

 

 

After the control's initialization we should decide if the sound under editing will be stored in memory or inside a temporary file: this can be done through the GetStoreMode and SetStoreMode methods; it's important to note that the sound under editing will be always stored in uncompressed WAV PCM format so its total size could become an issue when dealing with low-end systems:

 

 

At this point we can load a sound for editing purposes from different sources:

 

 

A loading session can be canceled through the LoadSoundCancel method.

 

By default, each of the mentioned loading methods will create a new editing session discarding the existing one: this behaviour can be modified through the SetLoadingMode method which allows loading a new sound without discarding the existing editing session and to perform one of the following operations:

 

 

As a further loading feature, you can limit the range of sound data that will be loaded from the given sound file with a previous call to the SetLoadingRange method, a useful feature if you want to extract a small portion of an existing sound file for editing purposes.

 

Information about the loaded sound file, for example the audio format, can be retrieved through the GetFileType and GetFileInfo methods.

 

Further editing features, applicable to the whole editing session or to a specific range, can be summarized by the following list:

 

 

A certain number of special effects can be applied to the existing editing session through the Effects COM object:

 

 

All of the mentioned effects are applied through separate editing sessions meaning that, for each of them, there will be a corresponding method to invoke. Through the interaction with our Active DJ Studio component, which supports most of the mentioned effects in real time during playback, you have the possibility to apply a certain amount of settings in a single editing session by invoking the Effects.PlayerSettingsApply method.

 

Basic noise removal is also supported for the following kind of noises:

 

 

See the How to perform noise removal tutorial for further details.

 

During the editing session the WaveformAnalyzer COM object allows performing a deep analysis and detailed graphical visualization, with zooming and panning capabilities, of the sound's waveform.

An editing session can be canceled through the EditSoundCancel method.

 

Contents of the editing session can be exported to an output file through the ExportToFile method. The encoding format used for the output file can be set through the EncodeFormats.FormatToUse property and settings specific for each available sound format can be set through the available sub-properties of the EncodeFormats property: if for example you need to export in MP3 format, you will have to deal with properties and methods available inside the EncodeFormats.MP3 property.

 

A basic playback system is also available in order to play the current content of the editing session; available methods are the following:

 

 

If you should need more sophisticated playback features, for example displaying visual feedbacks (VU-Meter, Spectrum, etc.) during playback, you should consider using Active Sound Editor in conjunction with our Active DJ Studio ActiveX control which comes with a method, named LoadSoundFromEditingSession, that allows loading and playing back contents of an editing session.

 

Through the SilencePositionsDetect method, the control supports Silence detection, a feature which allows detecting positions of silent portions inside the loaded sound and store them inside a list. The list of detected silent portions can be enumerated at a later time through the SilencePositionsNumGet and SilencePositionsGetRange methods.

Silence detection can be canceled at any time through the SilencePositionsCancelDetect method.

 

Related to the mentioned silenced detection, through the TracksPositionsDetect method the control support audible tracks detection also so, instead of detecting silent portions, in a very similar way it allows detecting and enumerating audible track separated by portions of silence. The list of detected audible tracks can be enumerated at a later time through the TracksPositionsNumGet and TracksPositionsRangeGet methods.

After reviewing enumerated tracks, you may decide that two tracks should be attached together in order to consider them as a single one: this can be done through a call to the TracksPositionsRangeAttachToNext method.

Audible tracks detection detection can be canceled at any time through the TracksPositionsCancelDetect method.

 

Finally, an editing session can be closed and its contents discarded from memory through a call to the CloseSound method.

 

Further capabilities of the control, not directly related to sound editing, are the following:

 

 

 

An important topic to keep count of is how synchronization between the container application and events generated by this control works: see the How to synchronize the container application with the control tutorial for further details.