01 Overview

A Fulwave session is an ordered list of stages. In Designer, each stage isn't limited to one sound — it can hold as many audio tracks and spoken-text cues as you need, each its own layer with its own timing, gain, and pan. Mix the layers, set how the stage begins and ends, then export the whole session as a single .fws file that FulwaveTimer plays on iPhone.

02 Quick start

The shortest path from a blank window to a session you can send someone.

1. Add Stage to start your first stage, then name it in the Stage panel.
2. Add Audio Layer… or Add Text Layer to give the stage something to play.
3. Set the stage's Duration, and repeat for as many stages as the session needs.
4. Press play on the bottom transport to hear the session as you build it.
5. When it sounds right, use Export Session (.fws)… to save the file you'll share.

03 Sessions & stages

The left-hand list is your session, top to bottom in playback order.

Session settings

Name the session, set how many times the whole thing Repeats, and pick a session Color Tag to keep multiple projects visually distinct in your library. Turning the repeat count down past 1 gives you Repeats: forever — the session loops until the listener stops it, which is what you want for ambient beds and open-ended meditation.

Adding and reordering stages

Add Stage appends a new stage to the end of the session; drag any stage to reorder it. Each stage gets its own name, color, and length, plus its own repeat count for looping just that stage before moving on.

Setting a stage's length

Type the length straight into the Length field: 5:30, 90, and 1h30m all work, and the field tidies what you typed into a proper time when you leave it. The stepper beside it nudges by a second at a time.

The preset chips underneath cover the common lengths in one click. A click sets the length — click 5m and you're at exactly 5:00, whatever was there before. Hold ⌥ Option and a click adds instead, so you can build a length from parts: click 5m, then Option-click 30s to land on 5:30. While Option is held the chips relabel themselves +5m, +30s, so you can see which one you'll get before you click. In a narrow window the chips collapse into a Presets menu that behaves the same way.

Session graphic

Give the session artwork from the Session Graphic control: pick an image already embedded in one of your audio tracks, or choose a PNG or JPEG from your Mac. This is the artwork FulwaveTimer shows for the session once imported.

04 Layers: audio & spoken text

A stage's Layers list is where the sound actually comes from.

Two kinds of layer

• Add Audio Layer… — bring in an audio file: a music bed, a coaching voiceover, an ambient pad.
• Add Text Layer — type text and have it synthesized in a Mac voice, so you don't need a separate recording.

A stage can hold as many of either as you like, and they all play together for the stage's length.

Telling layers apart

Each layer sits in its own card, colored by what it is: teal for audio, orange for spoken text, and gray for text that only shows on screen without being spoken. The badge on each card pairs that color with the layer's number, so two audio layers stay tellable apart, and the card's border brightens while it's expanded. The same three colors are used for the lanes in the transport timeline, so a layer looks like itself wherever you meet it.

Delivering speech: live or baked

A spoken text layer can reach the listener two ways, set by Deliver as live speech on the layer.

• On (the default) — the words travel to FulwaveTimer as text, and it speaks them on the listener's device over whatever else the stage is playing. They can pick any voice installed on their iPhone, including another language, or switch the stage to display only and read along in silence. This stays true even in a locked session: which voice reads to you is a comfort setting, like haptics. The trade-off is that a live phrase plays at the listener's own volume, so the layer's gain and pan don't apply to it.
• Off — the phrase is synthesized in the Mac voice you chose and mixed into the exported audio, placed exactly where your gain, pan and delay put it. Nothing about it can be changed afterwards: not the voice, not the language, not whether it plays at all.

Baked speech always shows its words on screen during the stage, whether or not you turned Show text on screen on. Once a phrase is inside the mix, the words are the only part of it the listener can still work with, so Designer never lets them disappear entirely. Before you export, the Export pane names any stages that are baking a phrase.

Start delay

Every layer can start partway into the stage instead of at the top. Run a 60‑second bed from the start of the stage and drop a 30‑second voice layer in at the 25‑second mark — the delay is set per layer.

05 Mixing a stage

Two mix stages: each layer, then the stage as a whole.

Per-layer gain and pan

Every layer has its own gain and pan control, shown next to it in the Layers list.

Muting a layer

The speaker button on a layer's card mutes it. A muted layer is left out of the export as well as the preview — it isn't a monitoring switch you can forget about, so a layer you muted while working stays silent for the recipient too. On a display-only text layer the same button shows an eye instead and hides the words rather than silencing them.

Muted layers also don't count against the pass-through rule in Saving & exporting: a stage carrying one untouched audio track plus a muted layer still exports without re-encoding.

Stage Mix: master gain and pan

Below the layers, Stage Mix sets a master gain and pan applied to the summed mix of every layer in the stage. Sliders snap to unity gain and dead-center pan, so the values that matter are easy to land on exactly.

06 Transitions & alerts

Transitions: Begins with / Ends with

Each stage sets how its audio starts and ends, independently:

Voice cues & stage end warnings

Turn on Voice cues to have the exported session announce stage names as it plays. Stage end warnings add a spoken "10 seconds" call and a 3‑2‑1 countdown near the end of a stage. Both are set per session, and recipients can re‑enable everything on their own device even if you ship a session pre‑quieted.

07 Preview & transport

The transport bar at the bottom plays the whole session timeline, not just one stage.

• Scrub anywhere in the timeline to jump to that point in the session; each stage's layers are laid out as lanes so you can see what's playing when, in the same colors the stage editor gives them — teal for audio, orange for spoken text, gray for on-screen-only text.
• Adjust a gain or pan slider while the transport is playing and you hear the change immediately — no need to stop and re-preview.
• Pop the transport into its own window if you'd rather keep it beside your work instead of pinned to the bottom of the main window.
• Stage transitions play. Fades and crossfades happen in the transport the way they will on the phone, so the part of a session you most want to judge — how it moves from one stage to the next — is something you can hear here rather than after exporting.
• Render Mixes (⌘⇧R, or the button beside the timeline) sums a mixed stage offline exactly as the export will, and the transport plays that file instead of the live layers. Gains above 100%, the pan law and the clip normalization are then heard rather than approximated, and the export reuses what you rendered — the file you auditioned is the file that ships. Editing a stage puts it back to the live preview on its own; there's no mode to leave. Only mixed stages can be rendered: a stage that passes its source through untouched, or whose text is spoken on the listener's device, says so instead of pretending to need it.

The transport is still a preview: it plays one pass through, and doesn't simulate stage repeats, alert tones, or haptics — those are play-time behavior in FulwaveTimer. Export and open it there to hear the finished session exactly as recipients will.

08 Lock policy & distribution rights

Lock session

Turn on Lock session before exporting if you want to control what a recipient can change. A locked session lets whoever opens it in FulwaveTimer adjust stage times, haptics, alert sounds, voice cues, the shortcuts that set their own Focus, and how they file it in their own library — but not the media, stages, or transitions you built. This is a client‑side policy, not copy protection or DRM.

Distribution rights

Before exporting, check I own or hold the necessary rights to distribute all audio and content included in this session. This attestation is required to enable the Export button — make sure it's actually true for every audio file and voice you've included before checking it.

09 Saving & exporting

Working file: .fwd

Save your project as a .fwd file (⌘S) at any point — layers stay un-mixed and fully editable, exactly like any other Mac document. Reopen it later and keep working.

Shareable file: .fws

When you're ready to share, use Export Session (.fws)…. Each stage is mixed down and baked into one clean audio file on export — a stage whose only sound-producing layer is one untouched audio track passes through without re‑encoding, and a text‑only stage stays live (FulwaveTimer synthesizes it on-device, keeping the teleprompter feature working). The Render summary in the Session panel shows exactly what will happen — for example "2 baked mixes, 1 live text." A stage with nothing audible in it exports as a silent stretch of its full length, which is how you build a deliberate pause.

Send the resulting .fws file to anyone with FulwaveTimer on iPhone — AirDrop, Messages, email, whatever you'd use for any other file. No account or server is involved.

10 Appearance & keyboard

Fulwave Designer follows your Mac's Light or Dark appearance automatically, and is built for full keyboard control — every panel and control is reachable without the mouse. It's a standard Mac document app: your projects live wherever you save them, no sign-in required.

• Space plays and pauses — unless a text field has the keyboard, in which case it types a space, the same as anywhere else on the Mac. Press Return to finish editing a field, or Escape to leave it as it was, and Space is play/pause again. The transport bar says so while a field is holding the keyboard.
• ⌥Space plays and pauses from anywhere, including while you're typing in a field, and ⌥. stops.
• File ▸ Open Recent lists the last ten projects and sessions you've worked on. It fills as you open and save files, so it starts out empty.

11 FAQ & troubleshooting

12 Support

Questions, bug reports, or feature requests: fulwave.com/Support.