Animate

Music & instruments

The Audio layer's built-in synthesizer — real instruments, notes as draggable blocks on the timeline, every edit re-rendered instantly.

Kreativus puts a playable instrument on your timeline. No plugins, no external apps, nothing metered — a real SoundFont synthesizer runs inside Kreativus, with 128 General MIDI instruments in sixteen families: pianos, guitars, strings, brass, reeds, synth leads and pads, and more.

The Audio layer

The toolbar’s music-note button creates an Audio layer — one layer, three ways to fill it:

• Text to speech — type a line, a voice reads it (the old Voiceover).
• Record — perform against picture with a 3-2-1 count-in.
• Instrument — pick an instrument and a tempo, get an empty music track.

(Audio files from elsewhere — WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, AIFF, CAF — need no tab at all: drop them anywhere or use File → Import and they land as audio layers.)

Everything an audio layer already had works on an instrument track unchanged: keyframable Volume with the draggable dB curve, the whole audio-effects stack — reverb on a pad, a compressor on the drum bus, EQ, delay, distortion, all nine — mute/solo, and export.

Notes are blocks

Expand an instrument layer in the timeline and you get its note lane — a piano-roll strip under the layer. Notes work the way you already think about keyframes, except they have length:

• Click an empty spot to place a note — the pitch comes from where you click (higher is higher), the length from the last note you resized.
• Drag a note to move it in time and pitch — one gesture, two dimensions. Octave lines and shaded “black key” rows keep you oriented.
• Drag the edges to make it shorter or longer.
• Alt-click deletes; right-click opens velocity (how hard the note is struck — it also shows as the block’s opacity), duplicate, and delete.
• Chords are just notes stacked at the same time — different pitches overlap freely; two identical pitches can’t sound at once, so they politely clamp.

A faint beat grid drawn from the track’s tempo snaps your drags to quarter-beats; hold ⌘ to place freely. The tempo is only a drawing aid — notes live on frames, your timeline’s own clock, so changing the BPM never moves a note you’ve placed.

A piano keyboard sits beside the lane — in the fixed name column, the way every DAW keeps it, so it never scrolls away however far into the timeline you work. It labels the pitches, and clicking a key plays it. Notes live on the timeline itself: moving the whole layer bar carries them along, and a note can’t sit before the bar starts (there’d be nothing to sound it).

Playing it live

Press the 🎹 arm button on the lane’s header and the instrument is under your hands three ways at once:

• The piano keyboard beside the lane — click keys to hear them.
• Musical typing — your computer keyboard becomes the classic two-row piano: A S D F G H J K are white keys, W E T Y U the black ones between them, Z / X shift octaves. (While armed, these keys belong to the instrument; disarm — or press Escape — to get your shortcuts back.)
• A MIDI keyboard — plug one in and it just works; with several connected, the lane header shows a picker. Velocity comes through, so how hard you play is how loud it lands.

Arming a lane switches the app to a fast response cadence for as long as it’s armed, so a key sounds when you press it rather than on the composition’s next animation frame — a 25fps project would otherwise put 40ms between your finger and the note. A MIDI keyboard was always on the direct path; this is what brought the on-screen keys and musical typing onto it too.

Recording a take

Park the playhead, press the ● record button: a 3-2-1 count-in, then the composition plays and every note you play lands as a block in the lane, live — held keys visibly grow until you release them. Notes already in the track keep playing underneath, so you can layer a take over what’s there. Press ● again (or reach the end of the work area) to stop: the track re-bakes and plays back immediately. The entire take is one undo step.

A metronome clicks along while you record (accented on the bar) — toggle it on the lane header; it’s monitor-only and never in your audio.

Loop-record is the way parts get built. What loops is the work area — and it starts out spanning your whole composition, which is nobody’s idea of a loop, so the lane header’s loop button has a chevron next to it: Loop 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 bars from here sets the work area to that many bars at the track’s tempo and switches looping on in one press. Then hit record. The bars cycle and every pass adds to the same take — kick and snare on the first lap, hats on the second, the ride fill on the third. The header counts the passes, and the whole thing is still one undo step.

Recording is honest to your timing — notes land exactly where you played them, not snapped. Then tidy as much as you want: the lane header’s Quantize button snaps every note onto the beat grid in one press (lengths stay — your articulation survives), the right-click menu quantizes a single late note, and it’s all one undoable step.

Editing many notes at once

Shift-click notes to build a selection, or shift-drag an empty patch of lane to marquee a whole phrase. Then:

• Drag any selected note and they all move together, offsets intact.
• Arrow keys transpose the selection by a semitone, ⇧-arrows by an octave.
• ⌘D duplicates the selection right after itself — loop a bar down the whole timeline in a few presses. ⌘C/⌘V paste at the playhead.
• Delete removes the lot as one undo step.
• Right-click a selected note for selection-wide velocity, Quantize, Humanize (quantize’s mischievous opposite — a seeded nudge off the grid that renders identically forever), and Legato (each note stretches to meet the next — gaps close, phrases become seamless).

Under the roll sits the velocity lane: one bar per note, tall for hard, short for soft. Drag a bar to set it, or drag across the lane to sweep a whole phrase’s dynamics in one gesture — a crescendo in a second. With notes selected, a drag sets the whole selection at once.

Playing in a key

Melodic tracks have a key, set in the Properties panel or the lane’s key button: pick a root and a scale — Major, Minor, Harmonic Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian, both pentatonics, Blues — and the lane tints the in-key rows so the shape of the key is visible while you work. Switch on Snap to key and everything you place, drag or play lands on the nearest in-key note; suddenly nothing you press sounds wrong.

A scale never rewrites what’s already there — turning one on can’t move a note you placed, and it never applies to a drum kit (where a “pitch” names an instrument, not a note).

Your own sounds

The bundled FluidR3 bank is only the floor. Load .sf2… — in the Properties panel, or the lane’s key menu — points every instrument track in the project at any SoundFont file — free orchestral libraries, vintage synth banks, chip-tune collections, the whole SoundFont world. Tracks re-render instantly through the new sounds, and the choice is saved with the project. One click goes back to the bundled bank; if a loaded bank ever goes missing, the project opens on the bundled sounds rather than failing.

Notes drive animation

The seam no other tool has: your music and your animation share one clock, and notes are exact event data — no audio analysis, no guessing. Press the lane header’s animate button and pick a motion:

• Bounce — a downward dip that recovers, landing on every note.
• Pulse — a scale pop; louder notes push harder.
• Twist — a rotation kick, alternating left and right.

Kreativus bakes a keyframe pulse per note onto a new Control layer (velocity scales the strength). Parent any layers to it — the character, the title, the whole scene — and the picture moves on the music. On a drum track you can drive it from one drum: a character that lands on every kick while the camera pulses on the snare is two Control layers and two pick-whips away. The keyframes are ordinary and editable; re-run after changing notes to bake fresh ones.

Finding an instrument

The Instrument tab is a browser, not a list: the seventeen families down the left — each wearing its own icon, piano keys to drum pads — and that family’s instruments on the right. The same icons follow the instrument everywhere: on its timeline row and in the Properties panel.

The drum machine

Pick a kit from the Drums family (Standard, Room, Power, Electronic, 808, Jazz, Brush, Orchestra) and the note lane becomes a step sequencer: fifteen drums as named rows — kick to crash — and a step grid in columns. Click a cell to place a hit, click a hit to remove it, right-click for velocity. A selector on the header switches the grid between 8ths, triplets and 16ths.

Your MIDI pads work here too — record a beat live and the hits land on their exact frames (the grid is a clicking aid, not a cage; quantize when you want it tight). Sustain pedal and pitch bend from any standard MIDI device also come through on melodic instruments — held-pedal chords record as long notes, the way they sounded.

Presets

Patterns live in two places: the lane header’s presets button, and the Properties panel — select an instrument layer and they’re a row of chips under Instrument and Tempo, alongside the track’s Key and the project’s SoundFont. Either way a press drops a ready-made pattern at the playhead — real, editable notes, not a locked loop. Melodic tracks get chord progressions, arpeggios, walking bass, pads and pulses; drum kits get four-on-the-floor, backbeat rock, boom bap, half-time, disco, a Latin groove, a tom fill and more. Stamp one, then bend it: every note drags, stretches and re-voices like anything you’d placed by hand.

Every edit is instantly real

There is no “render” button. The moment a note changes, Kreativus re-performs the whole track through the synthesizer and the layer’s audio updates — the waveform redraws, playback and scrubbing use it, and export mixes exactly what you heard. Undo restores both the notes and the sound they made. The rendering is deterministic: the same notes always produce the same audio, bit for bit, today or in a year.

Changing instruments

Select the layer and the Properties panel shows its Instrument — switch a piano part to strings at any time; the notes stay, the voice changes. Tempo lives there too.

Recipe — a quick underscore. Add an Audio layer → Instrument → Warm Pad, 90 BPM. Place three long low notes across the shot (drag them long), stack a fifth above each. Add the Reverb audio effect, then Audio Fade In and Fade Out from the Animate panel. Done — an ambient bed in a minute.

The instrument sounds are the FluidR3 General MIDI collection (MIT licensed, bundled with the app — nothing to download, nothing per-use).

The Mixer

Balancing a piece is a question about several layers at once — is the bass sitting under the piano, is the voiceover clear over the bed — and the Properties panel can only ever show you the one layer you have selected. The Mixer panel is the answer: every layer that makes a sound gets a channel strip, side by side.

Each strip carries the layer’s name and an icon for what it is (its instrument family, a mic for a voiceover, a film frame for a video’s audio), a fader in decibels, a level meter beside it, and M and S buttons.

• The fader rides the same volume the Properties panel edits, so the two never disagree — including automation: if a layer’s volume is keyframed, its fader moves on its own during playback, and dragging it writes a keyframe at the playhead instead of throwing your automation away. Double-click a fader to snap it back to unity, or use the arrow keys (hold Shift for fine steps). The scale runs from −60dB to +6dB with a tick at unity, and it is deliberately not linear — the top of the travel is stretched so the range you actually mix in is the range you can aim at.
• M mutes the layer. S solos it — and solo here is about sound only. That is worth being explicit about, because the Timeline’s row of solo dots is a picture solo: it hides every other layer from the frame. Soloing a bass line to hear it alone should never black out your animation, so these are two separate controls that do two separate things, and they compose — a layer has to survive both to be heard.
• Nothing here touches your selection. Every control writes the layer it belongs to directly, so you can be drawing on a vector layer with a brush in hand and still ride the music.
• The master strip shows the summed, limited output that actually leaves the app, with the whole composition’s mixed waveform beneath it. There is no master fader, because there is no master gain to write to — the meter is the honest half.

Mute and solo carry through to your export: the mixdown asks the same question about which layers count that playback does, so what you balance is what you ship.

Two things the meters can’t see, so you don’t misread them: they run about a fifth of a second ahead of what you hear (audio is queued up before it plays), and playing the on-screen or MIDI keys while a layer is armed monitors through its own path — you’ll hear it, but the meters stay still until the notes are baked and played back.

The Mixer lives in the Music workspace by default, and it’s in the Panels menu everywhere else — if you already have a Music workspace saved from before it existed, open it there, or use Reset Workspace to pick up the new layout.

The Music workspace

The workspace switcher (toolbar, top-right) has a Music preset: the same desk with the Timeline given nearly half the window — the piano roll is a lane inside the Timeline, so a music workspace is mostly a timeline tall enough to play in, with the Mixer standing under Properties on the right. Its scope keeps music and animation tools front and centre; everything else stays one search (or one workspace switch) away.