1. Introduction to Kangas Sound Editor (QI)

Kangas Sound Editor and the closely-related Kangas Sound Editor QI are designed to let you create or synthesize sound-effects and music without needing great expertise in either of these areas. All that is required to get great results is a certain level of patience — great results do not necessarily come quickly — and a willingness to experiment.

We will now take a tour of Kangas Sound Editor (QI) to help get you familiar with its features. This tutorial is designed to be read in ascending order of page numbers, as a fair number of these pages make the assumption that you have read or at least skimmed the pages before. Having said that, feel free to skip to other pages should you wish to browse or peruse other topics.

At times, some of the material in this tutorial may seem a bit abstract. It will almost certainly help you to learn how to use the Kangas Sound Editor software most effectively if you mix practical sessions with the material in this tutorial — even the difficult-to-understand bits will become clearer once you start gaining experience using the software.

You can navigate through this tutorial by clicking on the page numbers at the bottom to go to specific pages. You can go backwards or forwards through the pages by clicking on the left     or right     facing Kangas buttons or by pressing the left or right arrow keys. You can also jump to selected topics by clicking links on the left and right menus. Once you have jumped to a topic, clicking on the right-facing Kangas button or pressing the right arrow key may take you to a follow up page or pages on that topic, or to the next topic if there are no follow up pages.

It definitely helps to have cookies enabled, as these are used to remember which tutorial page you are on if you come back to it later — just bookmark Kangas Sound Editor tutorial. It also helps to have Javascript enabled as this is used for various things, including the embedded audio player and the colour change buttons.

The colour change buttons near the bottom of this page can be used to customise the colour of various parts of these tutorial pages. Clicking the buttons produces colours that repeat after at most 12 successive clicks, so you can always go back to an earlier colour by just clicking the button until it reoccurs. The individual buttons are as follows:

• Main — alter colour of the main areas. A good one to start with.
• Current — alter colour of the currently selected menu item and page number.
• Menu Links — alter colour of the menu links and also page numbers.
• Content Links — alter colour of links shown within content of individual pages.
• Highlights — alter background colour of the highlighted text.
• Highlight Text — alter text colours of the highlighted text.
• Nav. Bar — toggle display of navigation bar for the page numbers. This has the same background colour as the menus, so it may make it easier to find a colour combination that works for you.
• Shadow — toggle between black and white shadow; the latter gives a slight glow effect, and works best with darker backgrounds.

Some of the text in in this tutorial has been highlighted in various styles and/or colours. The significance of these styles is as follows:

• Names of fields in Kangas Sound Editor
• Names of field selections, such as radio button choices, in Kangas Sound Editor
• Names of columns in Kangas Sound Editor
• Names of labels in Kangas Sound Editor
• Data or values you can enter in Kangas Sound Editor
• Kangas Sound Editor dialog titles
• Messages shown by Kangas Sound Editor
• Kangas Sound Editor menus
• Kangas Sound Editor buttons

At any point, you might find it helpful to try the Quick-start procedure to create a simple sound (p. 45)

If you get stuck, we recommend using the Kangas Sound Editor help forum to help you get going again.

We would certainly welcome any feedback regarding your progress with Kangas Sound Editor (QI). Good luck!