Voice and music

Typecut narrates your script with an AI voice and times every scene to the words. Music sits underneath. This page covers choosing both and balancing them.

Choose a voice

Voices are listed for your workspace's language. A voice that does not speak that language is flagged in the list.

You can set a voice in three places:

• The wizard. In the Identity step, pick the narrator under Voice. A voice set as the workspace default is preselected.
• Workspace settings. Open the Voice tab and pick the Default Voice. New projects start with it.
• Project settings. Open Project settings… from the editor menu, go to the Voice tab and pick the Default Voice for this project.

In the voice list you can search by name, filter by tier, and set Preview in to hear a voice speak a different language. Voices marked Premium need a plan that includes them. On other plans they stay listed and previewable, and picking one shows an upgrade prompt.

Audition voices

1. Open the Voices page from the dashboard to browse the library. You can filter by gender, age and tier.
2. Press the play button on a voice to hear a preview.
3. Use Like on a voice to keep it handy across projects.

To compare voices on your own line, ask the Director to audition voices. It plays up to eight voices reading the same line. This is free.

Direct the delivery

In Project settings… under Voice, Voice Instructions takes extra direction such as "Speak slowly and clearly with a warm tone". Only some voice providers support it, so the effect varies by voice.

Pauses and gaps

Open the timeline and look at the Voice row. Gap boxes between lines show the silences. Resize a box to set a pause or trim a natural silence. You can also ask the Director to set a pause. Scenes tied to that line re-time, and the voice is not regenerated.

Choose music

In the wizard's Identity step, the Music section has three options:

• Choose a track. Pick from the music library, or use Or upload your own track.
• Generate a bed. Typecut writes an instrumental bed for this video that loops cleanly under the voiceover. It costs credits. You can describe the Sound and instrumentation, for example "muted upright piano, brushed kit, warm room", and set the Feel: Hushed, Steady, Driving, Lifting or Settling.
• No music. The video plays with voiceover only.

To browse tracks on their own, open Library and choose Music. Search by name, artist or tag, and filter by genre, mood, tempo and key. Preview any track before you use it.

After the project exists, ask the Director to set, change or clear the music, or to browse the beds you have generated. Generating a new bed spends credits.

To add a track from Assets yourself, right-click it and choose Add to timeline at the playhead.

Balance the mix

Levels

The wizard has an Audio levels section with sliders for Voice, Music and SFX. The defaults suit most videos.

In the editor, open the Mixer tab. It has a strip for Voice, Music and SFX, and one for every audio lane. Each strip has a fader, a meter, M to mute and S to solo. Lane strips also have a pan control. Double-click a fader to reset it to 0 dB.

Ducking

Ducking lowers the music while someone is speaking. New projects start with it on. The music eases down so it is already lower when the voice lands, then comes back after the voice stops. The defaults are a dip of 8 dB, a 0.25 second fade down, a 0.6 second fade up, and silences shorter than 0.7 seconds stay ducked so the music does not pump between breaths. The music also gets a small cut in the range where speech sits, which keeps the voice clear.

Projects made before ducking existed keep it off.

To change it, ask the Director. You can set ducking on or off, how deep the dip is, and how fast it moves. You can also ask for moments on a scene edge: a swell that lifts the music, a cue out, a cue in, or a hit that stops the music dead for a beat. In the classic editor, the track mixer has a Duck music under voice switch. To open the classic editor, choose Back to the current editor from the menu.

The editor, the share page and the exported video duck the same way.

Sync cuts to the beat

Typecut measures the tempo of your music and builds a beat grid from it. The grid is the ruler in the timeline.

• Read bars and beats. Click the position readout in the transport to switch between time and bars, beats and divisions. A chip shows the tempo, for example 120 bpm · 4/4.
• See how the song sits. The timeline's tempo group has a Song beats vs grid lane. Each tick is a beat found in the song. Green sits on a grid beat, amber is within 0.1 seconds, and red is further off.
• Fix drift. If the grid and the song disagree, the Problems tab says how far the ruler drifts. Use Adopt the song's grid to move the grid onto the song. Choose Constant for one steady tempo, or Follow the song (curve) if the song's tempo changes. Adopting moves the grid, not the song.
• Snap to the beat. When you drag clips or loop regions, they snap to beats. Hold Alt to move freely.
• Cut on the beat. A transition's length can be set in musical values, such as a quarter beat or one bar. See Transitions and camera.

Two switches in the Mixer tab let the music follow a tempo map:

• Preview follows tempo stretches the music in the preview only.
• Audio follows tempo stretches it once on the server, so the preview, the share page and the exported video all play the same file. A stretch past 20% is audible. Past 50% the song is left as it is.

Next: Captions