Audio Tracks

Composed shows usually have a soundtrack, and the Timeline arranges visuals against it. Audio tracks hold audio-file clips — music, a click track, a narration bed — draw them as waveforms, and feed them into the same mixer your layers use. Line a clip's hits up with the waveform and the whole show is cut to the music.

Audio tracks are timeline-only — they don't bind to a layer. They exist to carry sound into the mix.

Adding an audio track

Click + Audio track in the track header column to mint one. Or just drag an audio file into the empty area below the existing tracks — Filament creates a track under it and drops the clip in.

Getting audio onto a track

Drag an audio file from the library Files tab or straight from Finder / Explorer onto an audio track. The file registers through the same media-root machinery as video, so it relinks by relative path when you move the project between machines.

Filament plays whatever its decoder can open — WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, AAC / M4A, and Ogg among them. There's no format allowlist; it probes the file and reports what it finds.

Waveforms

Each audio clip draws its waveform right in the clip body. The first time Filament sees a file it decodes the whole thing once to build the waveform in the background — you'll see a loading shimmer on the clip until it's ready — then caches it, so the clip opens instantly next time. The waveform redraws crisply as you zoom, from a whole-file overview down to individual peaks.

Mixing

Every audio track is a stem in the audio mixer, just like a layer:

• Track header controls: rename, volume, mute, and solo.
• The Master tab of the pinned panel shows an audio-track mixer rack — one strip per track with its mute / solo and a live peak meter.
• Per-track routing: send each audio track to the device and channels you choose, using the same routing list as Settings → Audio.

A clip's level is its own gain × its fades × the track volume. Solo is one group across the whole show — soloing an audio track quiets the layer stems too, exactly like a mixing console, so you can hear one element in isolation. Overlap two audio clips on a track and they crossfade with the same equal-power blend as visual clips.

Sync, honestly

The Timeline is the clock, and audio follows it. A clip placed at 1:00 plays sample-for-sample from one minute into its file, and that mapping never drifts for the length of the show — an hour in, it's still locked. Start alignment lands within one audio buffer of the playhead crossing the clip, the same tolerance the whole engine runs at.

Audio plays at its native rate and pitch — the ruler is wall time, so there's no time-stretch to color the sound.