The workspace, floors and plans

Hello, and welcome to the first lesson. I'm going to take you around the workspace in this one, so that everything we do in the later lessons feels familiar. We'll look at how a project is organised, how floors and areas work, how you bring in a floor plan at the right scale, and how to keep your work safe. What you're looking at is the sample project that ships with the tool. It's a small café with three areas.

On the left is the Project explorer, which lists the rooms on this floor. In the middle is the plan, with six ceiling speakers already placed in the café. And on the right is the Inspector, which shows results for whatever is selected. Right now it's telling us the café meets its target at ninety decibels with sixteen decibels of headroom. We'll come back to what those numbers mean in lesson two.

One project holds five disciplines. The selector at the top left switches between them. Audio is where we are now, with speakers, coverage and amplifiers. Network is for access points and switches. Automation covers the ELAN control system. Video is for distribution, either a matrix or AV over IP.

And CCTV handles cameras, their fields of view and the recorder. The important thing is that the rooms and the floor plan are shared. You draw the building once, and every discipline uses the same walls. So if you fix a wall length while you're placing cameras, the audio design sees the same change.

Above the plan there's a row of views, and they're all the same project from a different angle. This is 3D. It builds the rooms from the walls you drew, with the ceiling heights and the speakers at their mounting heights. You orbit with the mouse, and the dock at the bottom has the same select, pan and fit tools as the plan.

The buttons at the top of the 3D view switch between a clean room view, coverage, the heatmap and waves. Walk and listen puts you inside the room at ear height, and we'll use that in lesson two. One thing to remember: changing the view never moves a device. Looking at the design in 3D is safe. Only an edit changes where something is installed.

Zones is where the audio equipment is organised. The top of the page lists the amplifier units in the project, and there's an auto-assign button that creates and assigns amplifiers from the speakers you've placed. Below that, each area becomes a zone with its own source and level. So this is the page that answers the question, what plays where, and from which amplifier channel.

Rack is the equipment rack designer. On the left are the devices from this project, with their rack height in units. You set the rack size here, in units, width and depth, and you can flip between the front and the rear. The elevation in the middle is what the installer will build, and the power budget at the bottom adds up what's in it. Lesson three covers the rack properly, including the auto-fill that lays it out for you.

And Wiring is the connection drawing. There are three ways of looking at the same wiring: a schematic with port-level connections, a system diagram that shows the broad relationships between devices, and room sheets that group the installation by location. Show schedule puts the cable list next to the drawing. We'll read all of this in lesson three. For now, just notice that the five views share one set of equipment. Add an amplifier in Zones and it appears in the rack and on the wiring.

Back in the Plan view, let's look at the Project explorer on the left, because you'll live in it. The first tab is Rooms, the list of areas on the current floor. The second is Devices. It lists every device on the floor, grouped by area, so you can find speaker four in the café without hunting for it on the plan. There's a search box at the top of the list when a project gets large.

The third tab is the Library. Search by model, brand or type, or filter by manufacturer and device type. Each model has a Place button and a Details button. Place arms the cursor, and the next click on the plan installs that model. Along the top there are separate libraries for amplifiers, matrices, players and Dante devices, and Import CSV lets you bring in a whole brand book in one file. The library is where lesson two starts.

The fourth tab is All tools, and it's worth knowing about. It's every command in the tool organised by task, from project details and saving, to floors, to commissioning and readiness checks. If you can't remember where something lives, come here, or press command K to search for a tool by name from the top bar. That search box at the top does the same job.

Now the right-hand side, the Inspector. It changes with the selection. I've selected a speaker, so it shows that speaker. Results shows the calculated numbers for the area. Properties is where you edit the selected thing, and Equipment lists what the project needs.

For a speaker, the properties are grouped: position and mounting, with the distances from each wall in metres, the height from the floor, and the mount. Below that come aiming, timing, and the product specifications. And Replace model swaps this speaker, or every speaker of this model, for another one, keeping the position and aim. That's handy when a client changes their mind about the range.

The dock at the bottom of the plan is small, but you'll use it constantly. Select is the normal tool, for choosing and moving things. Pan moves the view, and you can also hold the space bar and drag. Draw opens the drawing tools, which we'll see in a moment. Then zoom, and Fit, which brings the whole design back into view.

If you've zoomed into a corner and lost the plan, Fit is the way home. Just above the dock is the snapping toggle. With snapping on, a speaker you drag lines up with the others and shows you the distances as you go. Hold the Alt key while dragging if you want to place something freely for a moment.

Focus hides both side panels, so the plan fills the window. This is good for presenting to a client, or for working on a large drawing on a small laptop. Press it again, or press Escape, to bring the panels back. Nothing about the design changes while the panels are hidden.

Let's build something. Add area opens a form in the explorer. Give the area a name, then its length and width in metres, the ceiling height, and optionally the reverberation time, RT60, if you already know it. Ear level is the height the listeners' ears will be, one point two metres for a seated audience, one point seven for people standing.

You can add a door or a window in the first wall straight away. The venue preset fills in sensible values for a restaurant, a shop or a gym, including the target level in decibels. Then Add Area to Project places it on the plan, and you can drag it into position. This is the quickest way to start when you don't have a drawing, just the room sizes from a site visit.

When the room isn't a rectangle, use the Draw menu. Draw area is the rectangle. Draw wall lets you click corner after corner for any shape, and the ruler shows each length as you go. Interior wall adds a partition inside an area, Add door puts an opening in a wall, and there are curved and circular walls for the odd-shaped venue.

Wall materials sets what each wall is built from. The two people tools drop listeners onto the plan, standing or seated, and the calculation uses them as the positions that matter. And Set scale, which we'll come to next, calibrates an imported drawing.

Most real projects start from an architect's drawing, so let's talk about importing a plan. The Learning Centre has a guide for this, and I've opened it here because the picture explains it well. Import plan, in the Project explorer, accepts a PDF, an image, or a CAD file in DXF format. For a multipage PDF you choose the page with the floor you need. Then you calibrate. Open Draw and choose Set scale. Click both ends of a dimension that's written on the drawing, type its real length in metres, and choose Set scale.

In the picture that's the ten metre dimension. Then you trace the rooms on top of the drawing, on the correct floor. My advice is to check a second dimension before you trace anything. Use Set scale again on another labelled distance, confirm the suggested length matches, and cancel. Speaker coverage, cable lengths and the equipment list all depend on the scale being right, and it takes thirty seconds to be sure.

Draw walls, above the plan, is the wall drawing mode. Before you draw, you can pick the material for the walls you're about to place: standard or heavy drywall, concrete, brick, wood, metal, glass, or a door. Each material has a sound reduction figure in decibels next to it, and that's what the tool uses when it works out how much sound leaks from one room into the next. Click corner after corner, then Finish.

Walls can be edited one at a time. With Select active, click the middle of a wall. The blue highlight and the end handles show which one you have, and Edit wall opens with its length. Type a new length and press Tab to apply it. Arc turns the wall into a curve and exposes a bend value, and Straight removes the bend again.

Below that is the material for this wall only, so a glass front can sit next to a concrete party wall. Changing a length can move the adjoining corners, so after an edit, look at the whole outline and compare it with the drawing underneath.

Floors live in the Project explorer, just above the room list. Click a floor to switch to it, and double click to rename it. Add a floor gives it its own background plan, its own areas and its own devices. The building-wide things, like the equipment list, the rack and the reports, collect every floor together. So a three-storey villa is one project, not three.

Now, keeping your work safe. The Project menu has everything about the file. New project starts clean, or from a template of a villa or a restaurant. Save project file writes a named file to your computer, and Open project file loads one back. Save project to the cloud keeps it in your dealer portal account, so you can open it from another machine.

And Projects in this browser lists the designs this computer has saved automatically. That last one matters. The tool saves as you work, in the browser, and the status bar at the bottom tells you so. But a browser can be cleared, so before a big change, or at the end of a day, save a named project file as well. A PDF or a CAD export is a deliverable. It isn't the editable project.

The clock icon in the top bar opens the visual history. It shows your recent edits as a strip of thumbnails, and you can click one to preview the design at that point and restore it. For small mistakes, undo and redo in the top bar do the usual job, and so do command Z and command shift Z. The same window has tabs for client handover, readiness checks, room presets, guided tours and site tracking, which we'll see in lesson three.

The Help button opens the Learning Centre. There's a visual tour of the whole workflow in short lessons, help topics you can search when you're stuck on a control, and the manual as a reference you can print. If you type a task into the search, like scale a plan, it finds the matching guide. And nothing in here changes your design. You can read a guide for another discipline without leaving the one you're working in.

Finally, the settings menu. Text size scales the whole interface, up to one hundred and fifty percent, which helps on a high resolution display or when you're showing the screen to a client. The version number at the bottom tells you which release you're running, and its release notes list what changed. That's the workspace. In lesson two we'll put speakers into these rooms, read the coverage, and listen to the result in 3D. See you there.