Once tracks have been recorded, it's time to see if they cut the mustard. Thankfully, Tracktion 3 has some of the best mustard-cutting technology out there. That's because Tracktion's editing power is as good as or better than software costing hundreds of dollars more, yet it retains Tracktion's hallmark ease of use. As with most non-destructive editing software, Tracktion's editing allows you to "undo" and "redo" your edits to your heart's content - so there's never any fear of messing up your song. Explore some of Tracktion 3's various editing tools here.
THE TIME LINE
For the uninitiated, a time-line provides a series of time divisions against which you can arrange the components and sections of your song, in terms of bars/beats, seconds/milliseconds, or seconds/frames. The In/Out markers are the ways you define a section of an edit to be played in Loop mode. This is how you tell Tracktion what portion of your song you'll be editing.
AUDIO CLIPS
Once you've recorded or imported audio into Tracktion, it is presented in the arrange window as an audio clip. These clips provide tools for editing them right at the top of each clip, so you don't have to go looking for a separate button to cut or fade your clip from somewhere else on the screen. The squares in the center are used to slide the clip and its contents around while the arrows at either end are for adjusting the overall size of the clip. As a great time saver, every audio clip also has a built-in control for volume fades, performed by dragging the small square with the diagonal line through it to the appropriate Fade In or Fade Out point. To monitor what you're editing, simply double-click the clip, which will cause it to play back; dragging the play head across the clip will allow you to "scrub" it. And with the new Hover Editing in T3, we've sped up the process even further. Just mouse over a clip and click and drag the editing tools that appear.
MIDI EDITOR
The tools for working with MIDI clips are basically the same as those for audio clips. But, when MIDI clips are of sufficient size, they display a powerful "piano roll" style editor - with horizontal "lanes" that correspond to the note on the piano keyboard at left. As you can see, this editor also has tools built into the top of it, including: a "pencil" tool for drawing specific notes; an "eraser" tool for deleting notes (i.e., fixing mistakes); a "select" tool for moving and resizing notes; and a "line" tool for drawing lines of MIDI notes, controllers and velocity ramps. Tracktion 3's MIDI editor of course allows for Step Entry mode, as well as providing powerful quantizing features, creating and applying groove templates, and more.
T3 EDITING ENHANCEMENTS
New to Tracktion 3 are a host of editing enhancements. Folder Tracks allow hiding and showing of groups of tracks in an edit, with support for nested folders. This feature is used in concert with new Collection Clips, which lets you edit all folder contents at once. As a practical example of this, imagine lowering the volume or changing the panning of every element in a rhythm section, without having to go in and select each individual drum and bass sound - a huge time-saver!
A new Marker Track allows display of all your markers in the edit. But Tracktion's markers are special in that you can treat them as clips, much like audio and MIDI. So you can move them around, split, stretch and edit them. Name and color them as needed to identify different sections of your song. And store and recall them using lightning fast key commands.
