Putting individual text characters onto separate layers

Hi Emmleeds,

In addition to all the great suggestions given above, I found a script named "TextExploder" on https://aescripts.com/textexploder/ which does something similar to what you are looking for.

This feature is not available in After Effects as of now. I'd recommend that you post this as a feature request on our UserVoice platform: https://adobe-video.uservoice.com/ This way, others can vote for it too.

Hope this helps.

NKush

There is no reason you can't apply the Audio to Keyframes function from the Keyframe Assistant to an audio track and then use the any of the channel sliders to advance the range selector of a Text Animator to reveal another letter. You just have to change the Range Selector from the default to individual characters and decide if you want to include spaces. 

A simple beat counter expression, there are several versions out there, would do the trick.  Dan Ebberts Audio Beat Counter is one of the best. Read his article and then just copy and paste it to the end property in the range selector. I had to modify the threshold to 15 for my audio track. You can easily see what the threshold is if you select Both Channels in the Timeline and look at the Graph Editor with Value Graph selected. 

This is what my comp looks like and I've revealed all modified properties of all layers so you can see everything that I did:

There was not enough room to show you the entire expression in the screenshot so here it is:

threshold = 15;

audioLev = thisComp.layer("Audio Amplitude").effect("Both Channels")("Slider");

above = false;
frame = Math.round(time / thisComp.frameDuration);
n = 0;
while (frame >= 0){
  t = frame * thisComp.frameDuration;
  if (above){
    if (audioLev.valueAtTime(t) < threshold){
      above = false;
    }
 
  }else if (audioLev.valueAtTime(t) >= threshold){
    above = true;
    n++;
  }
  frame--
}
 
n

There is really no reason to get any fancier than this or buy anything. 

Text animators give you huge control of text layers on a per character basis.  If you truly need layer-per-chrascter control, you can use an opacity animator to reveal one character per layer. You could even use an expression on multiple layers to use the layer number index to define which character is visible.  

But you may find that you can use Animators to do what you need without isolating every character to a discreet layer.  We can give more specific suggestions if you provide more specific details about what you want to achieve.