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Embedded compositions

A composition from your music can be placed in an artwork, its notes drawn as vector lines as thick as the music editor draws them.

Embedding a composition

Compositions are in Files, under music › compositions: press Embed, or drag one from the list onto the canvas to place it there. Spotlight (⌘K) can embed one too: type its name.

Its colours are its own: it paints in the composition's colours without adding them to the palette. Each part's colour is chosen in its Voices section, and the bar lines' under Bar lines, from the palette or as a free colour.

What an embed holds

An embed shows the composition as last saved: saved in the music editor, in another tab, or arriving from the cloud or into your folder, the embed follows it. Unsaved changes in the music editor don't count. Following isn't a step to undo. The embed keeps a copy of the notes it shows, so the artwork draws without the composition, and a deleted composition leaves it as it was.

Editing the composition

Edit, beside the composition's name in the embed's properties (or Edit composition when you right-click the embed, its name in Contents or its track in Timeline), opens it in the music editor in a window over the artwork, with its own Save and undo. Saved there, the embed follows. The keyboard goes to whichever is in front, the window or the artwork, and only one plays at a time: playing the music pauses the timeline, and playing the timeline pauses the music.

The window

An embed draws its notes at its own scale (Beat and Row) and shows the ones that fall inside its frame: the frame is a window on the piece. Resize it to show more or less; the notes stay where they are and keep their size. Starts at bar sets where the window begins, and Baseline the pitch the notes hang from, C4 unless you choose another, so the picture stays put as notes are added or removed. Fit every note sizes the frame to the whole piece. To fit it on one side only, double-click a resize handle on an edge, or clear W or H in its properties; a corner fits both. Resizing it by hand on a side stops it fitting there. Turn on Moves with the music and, on the artwork's timeline, the notes scroll past a now line as they play, the line set as a share of the frame's width with Now line; when every note fits, the line moves across them instead. It's a track in Timeline, sounding or not.

Under Background, Fill paints the frame behind the notes in a swatch, and Padding leaves room on each side between its edges and the notes; nothing is shown in the padding, even as the notes scroll.

Like a smart object, an embed's contents aren't listed in Contents and can't be selected on the canvas.

Its Voices section (named in the composition's own word for a part) sets each part's colour, and a height that every note of that part is drawn at, in place of the heights the composition gives them. Neither changes the composition.

Audio

Turn on Plays its music under Audio in the embed's properties, and the composition plays on the artwork's timeline, as its interpretation plays it in the music editor, with its instruments and effects. It plays while the timeline plays, from where the playhead is, and stops when it pauses. Volume sets how loud it is.

It's a track in Timeline: drag it along its row to start it later, choose how many times it Plays or loop it, and end the timeline with it, as with a sprite or a program. The speaker beside its loop mark mutes it, as it does for a program that makes sound.

When the timeline has a length, Fit to the timeline plays the embed faster or slower, its pitch kept, so its plays fill the timeline from where it starts: set it to play twice, and the two passes together fill it. It can't fit a timeline that ends with it. Silence before and Silence after are the interpretation's lead-in and lead-out unless you choose none, or a number of beats of the embed's own.

To give a frame, a group or an artboard music without its notes showing, select it and choose Add sound only on a composition in Files, or "Add sound only" with its name in Spotlight. The embed goes inside it, or at an artboard's top left, sounding and drawing nothing. Shows its notes under Visuals switches any embed between the two.

An audio file (MP3, WAV, Ogg, FLAC, AAC, M4A or WebM, up to 3 MB) dragged onto the canvas becomes a soundtrack in the same way: it plays on the timeline as a track, at its Volume, for its Plays, and sounds in MP4 and WebM exports. Its file is kept with the artwork, as a dropped image is.

A sound that draws nothing, an audio file or a composition without its notes, shows on the canvas as a small box with a speaker or a note in it and its name above, which is never exported and can't be resized. Show audio nodes in Settings hides them all.

MP4 and WebM exports carry the sound of every embed in what's exported, as the timeline plays it, minus any that are muted. GIF and APNG exports are silent. Sound's end in the export's settings decides what happens to the sound still ringing when the video ends, such as a reverb or the release of the last notes. Cut off stops it there. Plays out holds the last frame until it has died away. Wraps to the start plays it under the beginning, as it would sound when the video repeats, which suits a loop whose last chords lead back into its first. An embed that moves with the music moves in every animated export, as it does on the timeline. A render in the queue needs its artwork open in this tab for its sound.

Copying

An embed pasted into another artwork stays an embed and follows its composition there too, in its own colours.

Flattening

Flatten embed, in its properties or right-click menu, turns it into an ordinary frame with a group for each part and one for the bar lines. It can then be edited like anything else, and no longer follows the composition.