Video Settings

Resolution

This is more or less useless (even though, funnily enough, a lot of work went into it to make it clean to use), as you can easily resize your editor by just dragging the window. This however, allows you to cleanly dial in the resolution you want if you are OCD like me. It also allows you to set the aspect ratio you want.

FPS Limit

This allows you to set a limit for how many frames you are allowing your GPU to render. Lowering this can help with both CPU and GPU usage, but raising this sky high can help immensely with how smooth the editor is to play.

Screen Style

This allows you to set if you want it windowed or borderless full screen. Full screen exclusive breaks alot of things and is a whole lot of extra work, so it likely wont ever come to the editor. No real need for it tbh.

Anti Aliasing

This allows you to get better clarity with a reasonably low cost to your GPU.

• Fast approximate is very cheap, and removes jaggies, but it doesn't help with beat lines not spawning properly at a distance.
• Temporal doesn't look that good if you move your camera around alot, but it works quite well with smoothing edges if you use a static camera (like with camera lock)
• Multi Sample AA gets additional information around each pixel on a sub pixel level to deal with both jaggies, and detail loss at a distance. This is recommended to use, but its expensive, and some GPUs do not like dealing with with it.

Render Scale

This directly brute forces more pixels to be rendered. This can be a major help with clarity but can majorly hurt performance. This setting is also GPU agnostic. This means that you may be able to use this instead of Anti Aliasing if your GPU isnt handling it well.

VSync

When enabled, this setting will configure the editor to perfectly match your monitors refresh rate. Its extremely handy if you are getting tons of tearing or want to minimize CPU load.

View Distance

Pretty self explanatory. This controls how much stuff is on screen at once. Generally best to leave this at default, but the option is there for those who want to change it.
The Affected by editor scale toggle will calculate the view distance to always keep the same amount of noted in view, regardless of what your editor scale may actually be. it calculates relative to 1000 editor scale.

FOV

This setting changes the field of view. its best to generally leave this at default, but you can increase/decrease this if you want to get a better idea of the headset view

Editor Settings

Prettyify Json

This should pretty much be left on all the time as this gives you nice, readable json for your save file. I know that it can take up alot of space in comparison to compressed Json, so there is the occasional use case for non pretty json. For the sake of cleanliness however, best to leave it on.

Auto Save and Auto Save Interval

This is highly recommended to be left on. The editor is currently not as stable as it could be, and this could save all your work if it crashes. Auto save interval is in total seconds, so 300 is equal to 5 minutes.

Editor Scale

This should be set depending on what kinds of songs you are planning on mapping. Low bpm (100 or less) should use a low editor scale, maybe 500-800, while high bpm songs (175+) should use a high editor scale, around 1500 for example.

Cursor Deadzone

Adds a dead zone that snaps the mouse cursor to the highway cursor. This is espeically useful when you have freehand enabled, as you'll be sure the mouse is snapping perfectly to the highway cursor.

Freehand Snapping

this controls how fine you want the granularity of the freehand mode, in Milliseconds. 1 or 2 is usually a good value.

Progress Bar Toggles

This is purely cosmetic and allows you to turn them off when the map loads if you dont want them in the way.

Flip "Drum Name: ID"

Another purely cosmetic setting. This flips the drum name text attached to the cursor so it can be read more easily from the spectrogram side of the highway.

Simple Velocity Control

This simplified the scroll box in the note edit menu to snap to the center of the 3 velocity zones; ghost, normal, and accent hit. The center value is dependent on what you set in the metadata screen; if the ghost/normal hit threshold is 30 for example, then the center velocity of ghost is 15.

Snap BPM Sub Beats

This should, in a vast majority of cases, be left on. Its a toggle that forces bpm changes to always have whole sub beat values. This can allow the movement and copy/paste systems to work correctly. If left disabled, and your bpm change doesn't have the correct amount of sub beats between it and the one infront of it, and you move or copy paste across that bpm change, it will cause the notes to be placed incorrectly. You can disable this if you wish but it may cause notes to not be placed correctly if you are careless with how you work with BPM changes.

Undo/Redo Bookmarks

Because bookmarks are placed down so infrequently, this option can be turned off if you dont want them to be touched by the Undo/Redo system.

Metadata Modifies ID's

This setting affects the metadata screen specifically. Because each note needs to go to a specific drum with a specific ID, having this enabled will update the notes along side the ID whenever you save. Recommended to generally leave this on, but in some situations where you are doing something very odd with your notes/drumkit, you can turn this off.

Sort Imported Drums

This pertains to the metadata screen. this will sort the drums to appear as they do in game (with the exception of kicks, which will always appear at the top of the list). if you want Paredit to have the same highway order as the game on final release, its best to have to this on.

Velocity Default Value

This also pertains to the metadata screen. This will change the velocity toggle to be enabled or disabled, depending on what you set here.

Hover/Delete Toggles

Allows you to chose what things the "hover and delete" button deletes (default is middle click).

Import Overlapping Notes

This changes the note importing behavior to either discard anything overlapping (ie, only keep one of the overlapping notes), or to keep the map as is and leave it untouched.

Audio

Threading Count

This allows you specify how many threads you want the audio loading to use. Some maps can have upwards of 10 tracks, which can be slow to load in single threaded.

Midi Device

This allows you specify what midi device you are sending midi to. Use a program like loop midi to act as an intermediary for a DAW or Paradiddle.

Midi Channel

Allows you specify what channel you are talking to. Best to leave at 1.

Midi Velocity Multiplier

This allows you to bring down the perceived volume of the midi being sent to a DAW or paradiddle, making it easier to hear quieter sounds if thats needed. Best to keep it at 1 as often as possible.

Volume

This should be set as loud as you can comfortably go. The higher the volume, the easier it will be to hear subtle sounds (like the quiet tink of a ride for example).

Song Speed

is EXTREMELY useful for hearing higher pitched sounds if you have trouble with hearing, or are listening to a quick and complex section in a song. Because song speed also changes pitch, stuff that's inaudible at the high end will suddenly become clear to the user, and it give the user more time to decided on the type of instrument they are hearing in a cluttered and complex drum section. Hot keys are - and + near the backspace on your keyboard.

Per Track Control

This wont be available to you in the main menu, but in editor all song will be listed. Mute will turn off that particular song. Solo will mute all songs except the soloed one. The slider on the right changes the volume of that track. Make sure to not put your volume too high or else it can cause clipping

Spectrogram (Waveform)

Selected from the audio visualizer drop down, this is an extremely quick and light weight type of audio visualizer. Its also extremely time accurate, allowing you to get more accurate than the spectrogram in most cases. This comes at the cost of a complete lack of frequency detail however.

Threading Count

Controls how many threads are used for the spectrogram. Its generally recommended to use 75% your total system threads. This means if you have 8 threads, its best to set this to 6. This is true until you set the Volume Granularity and Sampling Detail high enough where single threading performance comes into play, in which case its a good idea to go with 50% of your total threads.

Volume granularity

This controls how many different "volume" levels the waveform can use. This is essentially bit depth. This can be set can be set reasonably low and still look decent. There's current a Bottleneck with texture generation, and high quality waveforms are extremely taxing to generate. Its best to set this as low as you can while still being decent quality. 96 is a decent balance of quality and performance hit.

Sampling Detail

This affects how often the song is sampled (and therefor, how detailed it is on the time axis). Like volume granularity, there's a bottleneck with texture generation currently, so this should be set as low as you can while still looking quality.

Width

the width of the color gradient. 0 is no center, and 10 is nearly touching the edges.

Color Transition

How sharp you want the transition to be. 1 will be an instant transition, while 0 goes all the way from the center to the edge.

Spectrogram (Spectrogram)

Selected from the audio visualizer drop down, this is visualizer is recommended to be used in nearly all situations. This is a slower and heaver to generate and compared to the waveform, so its not enabled by default. It allows for a high amount of customization however, and in situations where frequency information is important, this is recommended to use.

Threading Count

Controls how many threads are used for the spectrogram. Its generally recommended to use 2 less than your total system threads. This means if you have 8 threads, its best to set this to 6. This is true until you set the Bins and Samples high enough where single threading performance comes into play, in which case you may need to go much less then your total threads.

Spectrogram Mesh

Most of the time Low quality will be surprisingly alright to use, but you can go higher quality if you want your spectrogram to be more detailed when you have a high amount of samples.

Spectrogram Texture

• Left/Right will only display the chosen channel. generation time is 2x faster than combined.
• Combined will use both left and right samples when doing the FFT calculation.
• Separated/Separated Flipped will show both the left and right channels as individual spectrograms. the flipped variant will show the left channel on the right side.

High Frequency Boost

Allows you to emphasize (or de-emphasize) the high frequencies. Works similarly to Sharpness, but for high frequency values only.

Sharpness

This can also be called sensitivity. This value is based on exponents, so a value of 2 will push high sound spikes to appear much louder, while a value of 0.5 will bring everything more flat.

Brightness

This works in conjunction with sharpness to allow you to have more control over how the spectrogram is represented. Tweaking these two settings can make quiet or loud sounds much better represented, without making the brightness on the peaks clip into oblivion.

Width

Purely cosmetic, but useful for if you have large amounts of spectrogram tracks.

Height

This allows you to get better control over how you want your spectrogram to look. Very loud songs can have a very tall spectrogram and this can help bring it back under control. Values of around 5-7 are recommended and will work in 90% of situations.

Logarithm

This shifts the spectrogram around to better emphasize low frequencies. 1 will show the entire spectrogram linearly, with values above 1 emphasizing low frequencies, and values below 1 emphasizing high frequencies. A Logarithm of 4+ is great for looking at bass and kick frequencies.

Frequency Range

This setting allows you to modify what range of the spectrogram you want to actually be included in the texture. Very useful if you want to grab just the first 5000 hz as it can give you a close up of low frequency's (like kicks, toms and snares). If you use this setting, its important to set your Frequency Bins appropriately; if you want to look at low frequencies, set you bins higher. If you want to look at high frequencies, set your bins lower.

Spectrogram Bins

This is a unique setting as it goes into the math of the spectrogram a bit. The higher the value you set, the higher the frequency detail you'll have but the lower the time detail you'll have. Because of the way the spectrogram calculates, the amount of samples you give it directly translates to the amount of frequencies you'll have, and the spectrogram must use all the samples given to it to calculate correctly. 1024 bins means the spectrogram will be averaging the values of the next 44ms of audio, so you can imagine that it might start to look smeary if you crank this too high. There are ways of mitigating this, and in the future I plan to add them, but for now recommended values are 256 or 512, as this gives a good balance of both time and frequency detail.

Spectrogram Samples

This is set depending on how many times you wish to sample the spectrogram audio. Its recommended to set this based using the Spectrogram Bins as reference. Use 256 Spectrogram Bins as a reference point, then set this opposite the value you set Spectrogram Bins. 256 Spectrogram Bins means 512 Spectrogram Samples, 512 Spectrogram Bins means 256 Spectrogram Samples, 1024 Spectrogram Bins means 128 Spectrogram Samples.

Drum Set

This tab wont be available in the main menu, but when in the editor proper, it is intended to be used in conjunction with the game for "hot reloading" drum sets. You can modify the Pitch and Volume for each instrument here, and every time you do a drum set will be saved for the game to use. When you want to reload the drum set with the new values, select the ParEdit Kit in game.