A meta-DAW for sound design. Draw weight and intensity against picture and set keywords, and Build casts every layer from your own library, across the whole film. Then export a Pro Tools session.
A meta-DAW is a DAW you work in by events, not files. An event is a sound you want at a moment in the picture: you give it a shape, draw its weight and intensity, and set its keywords. Build casts its layers from your own library, each chosen to complement the others, and deconflicts the whole timeline around your Hero.
It works at every scale: a single impact, a saved chain of events, a cloud of rain or debris, the backgrounds for every scene of a two-hour film. Tracks, trims and fades take care of themselves, and every layer stays editable. No model and no dataset: only your sounds, on your machine.
01
Trace.
Turn light and motion into control curves.
Trace reads light and motion in the picture and gives you a control curve with its transients, like CV taken from a source on a modular. Set a threshold and the peaks become sync points, or use the curve as automation for a background. Pro Tools and REAPER markers import too.
New cut? Drop in the new picture and Picture Conform moves your events with it, flagging any it can't place. No EDL needed.
02
Build.
Draw weight and intensity. Cast every layer from your library.
Draw weight, from sub to air, and intensity over time, and add keywords. Build casts every layer of every event on the timeline in one pass, each layer chosen to complement the others spectrally, so layers add up rather than pile up. Tracks, trims and fades take care of themselves. Step through the alternatives on any layer, and like or ban sounds.
Also: Alloy, one sound made of four of yours, and Trace from Sound, which takes the gesture of any recording.
03
Scatter.
A particle system, made of your own sounds.
A Scatter is a whole cloud inside one event. Every particle is a sound from your library, with its own moment, force and place. Fall is for what lands, bounces and breaks: debris, gravel, rain. Swarm is for what lives and calls: insects, birds, crowds. Draw the density over time, up to 1,000 particles a second, set throw, bounce, float or speed, and hear every change as it plays.
Each particle is panned to its own direction in 5.1, 7.1.4 or AmbiX, with what flies heard in the height speakers.
04
Hero.
Mark the Hero. Everything else is deconflicted around it.
Overlapping events are deconflicted in time and spectrum on every build, so a dense passage stays legible and the Hero cuts through. It uses timing and level automation only: no EQ, no filtering, nothing written into your files. The automation arrives in Pro Tools, visible and editable.
Exports never clip.
05
Recipes and Chains.
Save a whole chain of events.
A search tool returns a file. A chain returns a whole sequence, layered and in time. A recipe saves an event's intent: its shape, keywords, weight and intensity curves and variation. Chain recipes into a sequence, such as air building, a gust, the impact, the fall, then debris in wood, glass and metal, and place the whole thing at the playhead. Chains can hold other chains.
Each time you place it, it is rebuilt from the library you have loaded, so a chain is a fresh take on the same idea. Like sounds, or save a Bed, and it comes back with exactly the files you chose.
06
Scenes.
Design a location once. Use it across the whole film.
Mark your scenes, design a layered background for each location from Fills and Beds, and apply it wherever that location returns. Fills never audibly repeat. Backgrounds follow their scenes when you resize them or the picture changes, with editable crossfades at every boundary.
Built for a feature film, and used on one: [film title].
07
Pro Tools sessions.
Shape it here. Mix it in Pro Tools.
Gain per layer, EQ per event, and 7.1.4 panning for one event or a whole selection. Export a Pro Tools session with tracks in folders by bus, in their colours, with fades, clip gain, markers and each event's EQ as Clip EQ. Or an AAF, or a REAPER project.
Import your mix stage's track layout, and the export arrives on exactly those tracks.
08
Unbounce.
Unbounce a WAV back into events and curves.
Drop a sound you exported from Sonic Alchemist back in, months later and after Pro Tools, and Unbounce opens it into the events, layers and curves that made it. A whole session comes back the same way, from an AAF.
Unbounce to Source opens the exact layers; Unbounce to Recipe rebuilds the intent. A file processed in other software still opens if it keeps its name.
09
Export Variations.
One designed sound. A whole variation set.
Right-click an event, a chain or a selection and export up to 999 fresh takes as numbered files, ready for a Wwise or FMOD random container. Each take re-rolls the sounds, timing and pitch. Lock the layers that carry the sound's identity, and they stay in every take.
Mono to 7.1.4 or AmbiX, dry or with reverb. Seamless loops for ambiences. UCS names and metadata written into every file.
About.
My name is Vytis Puronas. I'm a working re-recording mixer with 20 years in film sound. I built Sonic Alchemist to reach my own libraries a different way. No AI, because there never needed to be.
Winner, Best European Project — San Sebastián IFF 2024.