The transport
- Play, and stop
- Back to the start
- Five seconds back or forward
- One second
- A tenth of the song in⌥5 is halfway.
PLAY and STOP stand in the header as two buttons, the way a tape machine has them. A second press of PLAY does nothing. The space bar is the toggle.
Click anywhere on the timeline to go there, and keep the button down to scrub.
The seconds box
- Open the seconds boxType a number of seconds to jump back or forward.
Digits write the number and nothing moves yet. The box says where it would land. makes the jump, makes the jump and starts playing, and leaves without moving anything.
Three digits at most, counted from where the box opened.
Markers
Markers are how you move through the song. Drop one where you are, then jump straight back to it for the rest of the session.
- Drop a marker where you are
- Go to that marker
- To the marker before, or the one after
The flags stand in the top band of the timeline. Click a flag to land exactly on it rather than near it, double-click to name it, and ⌥-click to remove it.
Verse, chorus, the bridge you keep arguing about, the last four bars. Two seconds of setting up saves an hour of scrolling.
The loop
The ruler makes the loop. Drag across the top band of the timeline and the transport runs from where you started to where you let go, either way around.
- Switch the loop you drew off and on
does not make a loop. It only switches the one you drew, and a loop that is off keeps its place and goes grey. A plain press on the ruler takes it away. There is no loop button, and a playhead already past the loop is left alone.
Export ignores the loop. An export is the song, not the bar you were working on.
The lane under the timeline
Under the ruler runs a lane: one bar per column, saying how much is going on. It is not a picture of the files and there is nothing in it to cut or zoom. It exists so you can see where the song lifts and click yourself there. A bar turns red where the mix clipped in that column.
It is hung off the song's own loudest point and reaches 24 dB down from it, so it shows shape and not level. What the level is, the meters say.
It shows what comes out of the speakers: solo, mute, the wet solo, MONO, all of it. It follows every knob you turn. Nothing goes grey and there is nothing to press: a picture that follows the knob cannot be stale.
The lane on the tracks you pick
Pick a strip and the lane draws that track instead, off the disk. Pick several and they are laid over each other in different colours, up to eight. Every layer is measured against the loudest of them, which is the only reason to lay them over each other at all. Let go and the mix comes back.
- Hold the lane on what you hearInstead of on the strips you picked.
The lane writes the names of what it is drawing, each with a swatch. A name with no swatch drew nothing: silent, never measured, or further under the loudest than the lane reaches. In the track list a row's number is written in the colour that row draws in, so the list is the legend.
A bus is not in the lane: it has no file, and what it carries is the mix.
No grid
There is no grid, no metronome, and no bar count, and this is not the beginning of one. The song has one tempo, and the echo on an effect channel is the only thing that reads it.