AD Event Groups
An Audio Description Event Group is a dedicated container within your project that holds AD events separately from subtitle, transcription, or translation groups. Because AD authoring follows a different workflow — rendering audio to synthetic voice rather than encoding timed text — the application treats AD groups as a distinct type with their own controls, validation settings, and export options.
Creating an Audio Description Event Group
To create a new AD Event Group, go to File → New → Event Group and set the Group Type to Audio Description. Give the group a clear display name, such as "AD English" or "AD French," so it is easy to identify when multiple languages are part of the same project. Click Create Group to confirm.
By default, Closed Caption Creator applies strict subtitle validation rules such as reading rate limits, overlap detection, and illegal character detection. These checks are not relevant for audio description work and will produce false warnings if left at their default values. When setting up an AD Event Group, it is recommended to disable Overlap Detection and Illegal Character Detection, and to set the reading rate and subtitle requirements to a high permissive value (such as 9999) and the minimum event duration to zero. This eliminates unnecessary QC noise during the authoring process.
Structure of an AD Event
Each event in an AD Event Group contains a start time and end time that define the narration window, descriptive text entered into the text area, a speaking rate control, a voice assignment, an optional speaker style dropdown (available for supported Microsoft voices), and a notes field for production comments. The event controls along the left edge of each entry allow you to force-render the audio, preview the event in context, and trim the event's out-time to match the exact duration of the rendered audio.
When text is committed to an event, the application begins rendering the synthetic voice audio in the background. A green spinner in the bottom-left corner of the event indicates that rendering is in progress. Once rendering completes, the render button will stop flashing. If a red error indicator appears, it means the event window is shorter than the duration of the rendered audio — you can extend the out-time manually or use the trim button to automatically align the end time to the audio length.
Organizing Multiple Languages
Closed Caption Creator supports creating multiple AD Event Groups within the same project, which makes it straightforward to manage audio descriptions in several languages simultaneously. Each group appears as a tab in the Event Group navbar above the Event List. Switching between tabs loads the corresponding group's events into the editor. This structure allows independent voice assignments, speaking rates, and render states per language without any conflict between groups.
Comparing AD Events Against Dialog
When creating audio descriptions, it is important to position narration windows in the gaps between spoken dialog rather than over dialogue. The Timeline supports displaying a secondary event group alongside your AD group so you can see where dialog cues fall and verify that AD events are correctly placed in the silence gaps.
To enable this, select your AD Event Group as the primary track, then open the Add to timeline menu on the Timeline toolbar and choose the subtitle or transcript event group. The dialog events appear as a read-only secondary track while your AD events remain editable on the primary track. To remove the secondary track, click × in the track label gutter. See Using the Timeline for full details on multi-track workflows.
Deleting an Event Group
To remove an Event Group, open the Event Group Options menu and select Delete. Deleting an Event Group is permanent and removes all events and rendered audio associated with it, so confirm that a backup or export exists before proceeding.