Mixing

The Mixer sets how your sounds sit together. Turn the music down under a voiceover, hear one group alone, and choose how loud the finished video is, without touching each sound.

Open it from Mixer in the timeline's header (it appears once your piece has a sound), from Menu › Audio › Mixer…, or from the button beside Bus in the Sound panel.

Buses

A bus is a group of sounds that share a level. Every sound plays through one bus, and every piece starts with four:

To move a sound to another bus, select it and choose one under Bus in the Sound panel.

Each bus has a color, and its sounds' waveforms on the timeline take that color, so you can tell the voice from the music at a glance.

A bus's row

Each bus is a row in the Mixer:

• The fader sets the bus's level in dB. 0.0 leaves the sounds as they are, -6 is about half as loud, and all the way left is silence. Double-click it for 0.0. With the fader selected, the arrow keys move it half a dB, or 3 dB with Shift.
• The meter inside the fader's track shows the bus as it plays: the top bar is the left side, the bottom bar the right. A thin mark holds the loudest moment for a second and a half. The bar turns amber above -6 dB and red above 0 dB.
• The dot at the end of the track turns red when the bus goes over 0 dB, and stays red until you click it, so you notice even if you were looking away.
• Pan places the whole bus from left to right. Double-click it for the center.
• M mutes the bus. A muted bus is silent in the editor and in your export.
• S solos the bus: you hear it alone, plus any other bus you solo. Option-click (Alt-click on Windows) to hear only that one. Solo is only for listening while you work. It isn't saved, and your export always has every bus that isn't muted.
• FX (in Full) opens the bus's effects under its row: EQ, compression, reverb and more, on every sound on the bus. The chip shows how many it has. See Effects.

Your own buses

Click Add a bus to make a bus of your own, up to eight. Double-click its name to rename it, and click its color dot to choose a color. The × at the end of its row deletes it, and its sounds go back to the bus they started on.

The master

The last row, Master, is everything together. Its fader and meter work like a bus's, and its FX chip holds effects on the whole mix, such as the Polish chain or a Limiter.

Under it, Loudness sets how loud your exports are:

LUFS measures how loud something sounds to people, not just its loudest moment. Platforms turn loud videos down to their own level, so a video made to their level plays as you made it.

With a target, a limiter keeps the loudest moments under the Peak ceiling, -1 dB unless you change it. What you hear in the editor goes through the same limiter. While a piece plays, the master's row shows its loudness over the last three seconds, and how much the limiter is turning down, if anything.

A piece made before the Mixer existed keeps Off, so it sounds as it always did.

When you export

Your export is mixed twice: once to measure how loud it is, then again to bring it to the target. When it finishes, the message says what it measured, for example Sound: -14.1 LUFS · peak -1.0 dB.

The presets in Export for set their own target, -16 LUFS with a -1 dB peak, whatever the Mixer says.

The sound on its own

To export only the sound, use the WAV or M4A buttons in the Mixer, or Menu › Audio:

• WAV is the mix through the master, uncompressed: 24-bit, 48 kHz.
• M4A is the same mix as AAC, a smaller file.
• Stems (in Full) saves each bus that has sound and isn't muted as its own WAV, in one zip. Stems come out before the master, without its loudness or limiter, for mixing again in another app.

The sound covers the same stretch as your video export: the whole piece, or its render range.