While working on sound for a story, you may find that you want to edit a sound in a way that's easy in your favorite dedicated sound editor (like Goldwave, Audacity, Audition/Cool Edit, Soundbooth, etc.) but not in Springboard. Just for these situations, Springboard supports editing a sound clip in an external program. You can use the features you're used to in your sound editor while still benefiting from Springboard's storyboard structure.

The steps in the process are:

1. Configure external editing in the Edit > Preferences dialog, on the Edit  Sounds tab. Test it with the Test button on that tab before continuing.
2. Select the sound clip you want to edit externally in the Story Tree.
3. Do Edit > Edit Sound Externally, or choose Edit Sound Externally or Split And Edit from the context menu, or press the button in the Story Tree's tool bar.
4. Edit the sound in the external editor, and save it back to the same file.
5. Return to Springboard. The sound clip will update automatically to match the saved file. When you play your story in the Movie View, you will hear the new sound.

Sound Clips And Split Files

When you are done editing a sound clip externally, you can choose Edit > Unify to merge your sound back into the main story file if you like. Unlike editing images externally, you don't have to do this - you can keep sound files split out if you like.

Also, unlike other split files, which are saved as Springboard story files (.sbd), split files containing sound clips are saved as Windows WAVE files (.wav). This allows them to be edited by any standard sound editing program.

Troubleshooting External Editing

• If a sound clip hasn't yet been saved to its split file when you edit it externally, Springboard alerts you with a dialog box and gives you a chance to save it.
• If you get an error message like "A device attached to the system is not functioning" when you try to edit a sound using Edit Sound Externally or using the Test button in the Preferences dialog, Windows may not be configured correctly to edit the specified image type. Try changing the options in the Preferences dialog - some applications are set up to do Open properly but not Edit, or do not support Open or Edit. If changing these options doesn't work, you can try specifying the command line directly in the Preferences dialog by selecting the "With this command line:" radio button, browsing for the program file, and adding any necessary command-line arguments. (This may require detailed understanding of the way your sound editor works.)
• Some sound editors, such as Audacity, take a "project" approach to editing a file. They will open a sound clip's split file correctly, but when you save your changes, they will save them to a different place - often a project file or folder near the split file. You may have to do something different to get them to save back to the same .wav file. For example, in Audacity you need to do File > Export, then confirm that you want to overwrite the original split file.