The Whiteboard
This board is the core ideation playground provided to you as part of Cosonify. On this board you can let your ideas fly freely and share them with your collaborators. At its core, it is similar to many other whiteboarding tools out there, but like all boards in Cosonify, we have adapted to concept to work perfectly for musicians. This includes the options to upload audio and see a wave representation and a web player, the possibility to add songs from Spotify and the availability of freehand writing, enabling you to jot down tabs. Let's dive right in!
Overview
To access the Whiteboard, click the Whiteboard icon in the project menu on the left or open the Infoboard and click the Whiteboard card. In its empty state, you will see the following:
- The menu of available item types on the left.
- The main canvas.
- The zoom controls.
Whiteboard.png
Available Tools
Audio Upload
The first option (depicted by a song wave) offers you the possibility to upload an MP3 file and place it at any place on the canvas. It will be represented as a song wave that functions as a player. Any collaborator in the project can see the item, play it and listen to the song.
This item type is intended to be used to share short sound bites as part of your ideation journey or longer segments that might have originated in a rehearsal session or that you have recorded in any random situation and want to share in this early stage of your project.
Text items
These items are by far the most flexible. You can use them like sticky notes on the canvas to provide content and lyrics ideas or to structure the board by providing headlines. You can also use them on top of other items, like audio items, to leave a comment about a song at a specific time.
Shapes
Currently, we are only providing one shape, a rectangle, but we are working on adding further options in the future. The rectangle can provide a background colour to a part of the canvas or generate a structure on the board, i.e., to build a table. If you have some time on your hands, you can also draw pixel art with them 😃
Free Drawing
Selecting this option brings up a pen that you can use to draw freely on the canvas. This option is particularly useful on a tablet and allows you to interact with the whiteboard like a piece of paper.
This tool can draw, write text, decorate your board, or add arrows. There are no limits to your creativity.
Template Lines
There are two options for this item: 5 or 6 lines depending on which kind of notes you want to jot down, and you can use it with the free drawing tool to make notes about short melodies or annotations.
We plan to provide several further items, such as further shapes, Spotify songs and image items.
General item functions
All items share the following functions:
- Ordering: You can move items to the background or foreground completely or layer by layer by clicking the context menu button below the selected item and selecting the relevant option. Important: While an item is selected, it is always displayed in the foreground to help you see the changes you make to it.
- Resize and Rotate: When you select an item, the boundary markers that appear all around the item can be used to resize the item. The additional marker at the top can be used to rotate the item. If you select multiple items, you can perform these actions on multiple items at the same time.
- Colours: The text and shape item types offer a colour selection below the selected item that allows you to choose the text or shape's colour.
- Moving items: As a core functionality of a Whiteboard, you can drag around the items to reposition them on the board.
- Copy and Paste: In the context menu, you can also select copy and paste to create a duplicate of the current items. Zoom options
In the Zoom menu, you can zoom in and out of the canvas, allowing you to focus on a specific part or expand the canvas to have more room for creativity. You can see your current zoom factor in the centre and use either your mouse wheel or the "+" and "-" button.