TRACKTION HOW-TO GUIDE
When you downloading and run the latest Tracktion installer exe (from www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/downloads), it'll create a desktop shortcut to run the program, and also a Tracktion group in the start menu. Running it should produce a big grey window that goes through some start-up tasks, and then you'll leaves you wondering..
Tracktion has 3 main screens - the projects screen, edit screen, and settings screen; to swap between pages, you can click on the buttons at the top of the screen. When it first starts up, it'll show the projects page (and there won't be an edit screen, as you haven't yet opened an edit). More details on each of these screens coming up later.
The most important thing to remember when using Tracktion is that for most operations, you select something you're interested in by clicking on it, and this makes its properties appear in the properties panel (along the bottom of the screen) - which you can then edit. This applies whatever you're selecting - anything from a filter to an audio device, and in general the objects that are selected will be highlighted in red, (or with a red outline or some other kind of appropriate colouring).
Moving the mouse cursor over most of the on-screen objects will display a brief one-line tool-tip at the top-right of the screen, very handy for explaining roughly what it all does.
For more in-depth help about particular items, pop-up help (which is turned on by default) covers your screen with big pop-up windows full of help notes about the things you move over. Although very useful for learning, this can get in the way when actually working, so it can be turned off by a menu option accessed by the help button (bottom-left of the screen). There's also a 'compromise' option on this menu, where it'll only pop up if you keep the mouse still for a few seconds, so it's there if you need it, but shouldn't be quite so intrusive.
A Tracktion project is a collection of audio files and edits.
In terms of the user interface, projects are listed in the treeview in the top-left window of the projects screen, and clicking on a project will select it, and display the contents of that project in the main list to its right.
If you right-click on the folder at the top of the projects tree, a menu will appear with a 'create new project' option.
This will then prompt you for a filename for the new project. It's sensible (but not mandatory) to keep each project in its own directory, so that its associated files don't get mixed up with those of other projects.
There are several ways:
Once a project is selected, all the items it contains are listed, and each of these can itself be selected. Items can also be re-ordered by dragging them up and down, or by clicking the column-headers to sort the list by the contents of that column.
When you click on a project, it becomes selected, and its contents are listed in the main area of the screen; the items in the list can then be clicked on to select them and edit their properties. Different types of items are indicated by colour, and described by the 'type' column in the list.
Clicking on an item that is an audio clip will show a thumbnail view of its waveform, and this can be played back by pressing the 'play' button on the right of the waveform window. (Other ways of playing the selected wave file include: double-clicking its row of the list; pressing the spacebar or return key, or clicking and dragging the mouse inside the thumbnail view.)
To import existing wave files into a project, first click on the project itself to select it. Then in the project's properties, there is an 'import material' button that provides a number of different ways of finding files to import.
Note that if you import a wave file from somewhere else on your disk, no copy is made of the file. The project just contains a reference to that file, so if you later move, rename or delete it, it'll show up as a missing file. If you import a CD track, however, a new file is created in the same directory as the project.
If you try to import files from a removable disk, you'll automatically be asked whether you want to make a local copy of these files.
First select the project you want to add it to, by clicking on that project in the project list. The properties panel for a project contains a 'create new edit' button that will do just that. Once the new edit appears, you can select it and change its name, description, etc.
Select them, and press the delete key (or the 'delete item' button). If it's an edit, this will delete the .trkedit file as well as removing it from the list. For audio files, you'll get the option to just remove it from the project list, or to actually delete the file as well.
You can select multiple items in the list by holding down the shift and ctrl keys when clicking on the items.
Technically, a project is a collection of links to edits and audio files. The project file itself (the .tracktion file) is quite small, and only contains the names and descriptions of these files, which exist elsewhere, e.g. as .wav or .trkedit files (usually in the same directory as the project file, but not necessarily).
A project contains a set of links to edits and audio files, so if the files to which it refers are deleted, their entries within the project won't be affected. When you try to do anything with them, however, they'll show up as 'file missing'. Conversely, deleting an item from a project won't necessarily delete the file it refers to (although Tracktion usually offers the choice to do this).
It's perfectly ok for an edit to contain references to items in other projects, although for Tracktion to find the material to which it refers, these projects must currently be open (i.e. they must be listed in the projects tree-view).
Projects listed under the 'libraries' folder of the project tree-view can be used just like active projects, but it's intended as a place to put projects with library material that gets shared across multiple projects. For this reason, slightly different rules apply when exporting items from projects in the library list.
Tracktion archive files (.trkarch files) allow entire projects and edits, along with all the material needed to play them back correctly, to be compressed into a single file.
Archives can be compressed losslessly (meaning that there's no loss in sound quality - this uses FLAC compression and is great for making back-ups, but the files produced are quite large) or lossily using Ogg-Vorbis compression (which produces very small files for easy distribution, but degrades the sound quality slightly).
When creating archives of edits, there is also an option to include only the sections of audio files that are actually used in the edit, so if you only use 1 second of a 3-minute file, only 1 second will go into the archive.
Just like loading a project file, you can double-click the .trkarch file, drag-and-drop it onto the Tracktion window, or use the 'load archive' menu item to find it.
You'll be asked to choose a directory into which the archive will be decompressed, and then the original project files will be copied from the archive into this directory, and the project will be opened, after which you can use it like any other project.
If you select a project, its properties panel will contain an 'export project' button. This will let you create an archive containing copies of all the material inside the project, compressed either losslessly or at various compression ratios.
Instead of putting the files into an archive, the export dialogue box also has an option to copy the files to another directory - this can be handy for backing-up or taking a snapshot of the project.
As well as exporting an entire project, you can choose to export a single edit (either select the edit on the projects screen, and click 'export edit', or open the edit and click 'export').
Unlike exporting a project, where all the files are copied, you are given the option to copy only those sections of audio files that are actually used in the edit. You also have an option to leave a few seconds of extra audio at the ends of these excerpts, so that after the archive is opened there's a bit of room for fine-trimming.
Another difference between exporting an edit and exporting a project is that for a project, copies are made only of files that come from that project, but for an edit, copies are made of any files from any projects that it references.
To create an empty edit, select the project you want to create it in from the project list, and click the 'create new edit' button in its properties panel. You can then select this new edit and rename it, give it a description, rename the edit file, etc. By default, the edit will be created as a .trkedit file in the same directory as the project to which it belongs.
To open an edit and get editing, either double-click its row in the project list, or just click once to select it and press the return key, (or the 'open for editing' button on the properties panel).
The current position in the edit is shown by a vertical purple line - this is where playback will start from if you press play, and moves along to show the current position when playing. There are lots of ways to move this cursor around:
When dragging the cursor with the mouse, or using the left/right cursor keys, holding down the shift key will keep the cursor in the same place and move the edit behind it instead.
To start/stop playback, you can use the transport buttons (bottom-right of the screen), or press the spacebar (this and other key-shortcuts can be changed using the keyboard mapping options).
Clicking-and-dragging on the timebar at the top of the screen also lets you navigate around, but in a slightly different way - dragging parts of the timebar that aren't near the cursor lets you scroll the screen without the cursor moving, but dragging the cursor itself lets you drag it as normal.
There are a few ways to do this:
There are a few keyboard shortcuts to zoom right out and show the whole edit (default key: F5) or to zoom in and show a few seconds around the cursor (F6). Other zooming shortcuts let you fit all the tracks on-screen vertically (F8), or set tracks to a normal size (F9). Check out the keyboard shortcut dialogue for a full list (click the 'keys' button at the bottom-left of the screen).
Between each track there is a thin area you can drag with the mouse to stretch the track's vertical size. Dragging with the left button will affect one track, whilst dragging with the right will affect all the tracks above it. Other ways of changing track heights are:
When the tracks don't fit on screen, you can scroll them up and down using either the scrollbar on the far right, or the mouse wheel (when the mouse is off to the left or right of the main edit area).
Up to 9 markers can be placed at points along the edit, so you can quickly jump back to them later. To insert a marker at the cursor position, press CTRL + one of the number keys, and to jump back to a marker, just press the appropriate number key.
To remove a marker, you can press CTRL + the number twice.
At the bottom-right of the edit screen, the master volume control has individual settings for the left and right outputs. To move both at once, click in the middle and drag it; to change the left or right level on its own, click on the left or right and drag.
There are quite a few ways of doing this:
Down the left-hand edge of the edit screen, there are little draggable icons to represent each of the enabled input devices in your system.
Dragging these around lets you 'plug them into' a track, which is indicated by an arrow pointing at the track; if the device is dragged to the left, there's no arrow, and the device isn't active.
When the record button is pressed (or its shortcut key, which defaults to 'R'), any input devices that are 'plugged-in' will start recording into their tracks. Obviously, midi inputs will record midi clips, and audio inputs will record audio clips. For more options about recording formats, etc., clicking on the input devices to select them lets you view their properties.
Tip - There's a handy key shortcut (default: ctrl + R) that will abort the current recording without adding any new material to the edit, and clean up any files that were being created.
See also punch-in and pre-count recording
Also see the quick-start guide for more info.
You can select a clip in the edit by clicking on it - it'll be outlined in red to show that it's selected, and its properties are shown in the properties panel.
Once selected, a clip also has a bar along its top, which can be used for moving and trimming it.
To move the whole clip from track to track or left/right, drag any part of this bar (that hasn't got a button on it). To move it up and down without changing its start time, hold down the shift key.
To trim the ends of the clip, each of the buttons along the bar has a different effect, moving either the start, finish, or both, and either keeping the clip's contents in sync with the edit, or moving them. The best way to find out more about these functions is by using Tracktion's pop-up help when the mouse is over them, or see the quick-start guide.
There are many other specialised ways of trimming and moving clips. Most of these are accessed by first selecting a clip, and then down the right of its properties panel, buttons called 'move clip', 'split clips', 'delete region' will pop-up menus of fairly self-explanatory operations that can be done.
Tracks can be muted or soloed by clicking on the 'S' and 'M' buttons at the right of the tracks; the mute/solo buttons for tracks that aren't being played are shown with a red cross through them.
Tip - Holding down the ctrl key when clicking a solo button will un-solo any other tracks that are currently soloed - this is handy for flipping between a few tracks.
Right-clicking the mute/solo area will pop up a menu with more options.
To preview a single clip on its own without any filters, you can double-click the clip, which will start playing from the mouse position. While this preview is playing, you can click and drag on the clip to listen to different parts.
When a set of clips is selected, you can copy this set to the clipboard (ctrl + C), and paste them back in somewhere else.
When pasting into an edit, the new clips will be pasted in at the current cursor position. If a track is selected when pasting, the clips will be go into this track, otherwise they will be pasted into the last track that was clicked on with the mouse.
To paste into tracks by inserting and moving all the existing material along, first select the set of tracks that should be affected, and click the 'insert into tracks' button in the properties panel.
The vertical red bars on the edit are in/out markers that can be moved around to indicate a region on which operations should be performed.
To move the markers, you can either
If playback looping is turned on (using the loop button in the bottom-right of the screen), the marked region defines the extent of the loop that will be played.
To delete a marked region of an edit, select either a set of clips or tracks, and then use the 'delete region' button in the properties panel to choose the type of deletion to perform.
The marked region can also be used to indicate an amount of space to insert - select a track and click the 'insert into track' button.
If the 'punch' button is turned on (this is bottom-right of the screen, just below the transport controls), the in/out markers are used as a region for punching in/out. If the cursor is then positioned at some point before the mark-in, and recording started, the edit will play back up to the marker, at which point it'll start recording; it will keep recording up to the mark-out, and then stop.
There is also a pre-count option, accessed from the 'click-track' button menu. This lets you specify a number of bars of pre-count that will be played before a recording starts. If turned on this means that when recording begins, the cursor will jump back by a number of bars and play the click-track until it reaches the original cursor positon, where it will start actually recording.
Above the filters area at the right of the edit, there is a 'new filter' tool that can be dragged around with the mouse. To add a new filter to a track, drag this over to the place you want to create a filter (a red highlight will be drawn to show you where the filter will go), and let go.
This will then pop-up a menu to let you choose the type of filter to add. The first few filters on this list are the Tracktion built-in filters, and any plug-in VST filters are listed afterwards, in sub-menus that reflect the subdirectories in the plugin directory.
Once a filter has been added, you can select it by clicking on it, and edit its properties. Filters can also be dragged around, copied to the clipboard, pasted, and deleted as you'd expect. To select multiple filters at once, hold down the ctrl key when clicking on them.
Each track in an edit can be sent to any of the available output devices. So a track being used to hold midi clips might be sent to a midi output device, and a track with audio clips might be sent to an audio output device.
When a track is selected, its properties panel contains a list of possible destination devices and tracks, with a tick showing the current setting. A track's destination is also shown below its output filters (but only for tracks that are all enough to have room for this on-screen).
It's also possible to divert a track's output into another track. This means that several tracks can be channelled into another to have a common effect filter applied to the whole lot (and this track could itself be diverted to another track, etc., until finally reaching a real output device).
If a track contains material that can't be played by the type of output to which it's assigned, a warning symbol will appear next to the track's name; moving the mouse over this will show an explanation of the problem.
Midi clips aren't editable until the track they're in is made tall enough to show a detailed midi editor. See above for various ways of changing track heights, but you can also double-click a midi clip to quickly enlarge it.
When the midi clip is big enough and the mouse is over it, an extra toolbar pops up with midi editing tools and options. The piano keyboard on this toolbar lets you:
There are 3 midi tools available, which you switch between using the buttons on the pop-out toolbar. The tools are:
The midi editor is either in note-editing mode (the default), where midi note on/off events are shown, or in controller-editing mode, where a particular midi controller is displayed as a continuous sequence of values. There are buttons on the pop-out toolbar to switch between these modes. The tools have slightly different effects in each mode - for more help about the exact functions of the tools, have a look at the pop-up help available when you hover over each of the tool buttons.
A special-case controller-editing mode is velocity mode, which lets you edit the velocities of note-down events as if they were controller events. To make it easier to edit the velocity of just a subset of the notes, this mode will only act on those notes that were currently selected when velocity-mode is entered. If no notes are selected when entering velocity mode, the velocities of all the notes will be shown.
There is also a sysex editing mode, where midi sysex events are displayed as blobs which can be moved around. Individual events can be selected in order to edit their (machine-specific) contents.
If you want to apply a filter to the entire mix, just drop the filter into the master filter chain - this is just above the master volume controls.
If you want to take a group of tracks and apply a filter to the sum of all their output, just redirect all these tracks to feed into another track and add filters to the destination track. This track can itself be redirected into another track, of course.
Select the track you want to add the clip to, and in the track's properties, there is a button marked 'insert a new clip'. This will insert a new midi (or audio) clip at the cursor position, which you can then trim to the size you need.
All individual midi messages contain a midi channel number between 1 and 16. In Tracktion, channel numbers are assigned to midi clips, and when the clip is played, its channel number is applied to each of the events inside it. To change a midi clip's channel number, just select the clip and change the number in its properties panel.
When recording from a midi input device, you can select the device and change its channel property, which will manually set the channel number given to newly recorded clips that it creates. If this number is set to 'any', it will use the channel number from any incoming midi messages it receives.
The midi program number is a midi controller message that specifies the type of sound to be used. Although the program number can be edited in the same way as for other types of midi controller, there are also some shortcuts for setting it:
If you want to play back a midi clip using an external midi device (or an internal hardware midi synthesizer), you can choose this device as the output for the track that contains the midi clip.
A more powerful approach is to use a soft-synthesiser plug-in to turn the midi notes into audio data. If a soft-synth is placed as the first filter in the track that contains the midi clip, its output can then be passed through to other audio effect filters in a way that wouldn't be possible for a hardware midi unit. Using soft-synths also means that the synth's settings are stored in the edit and playback will always be exactly the same when reloaded.
Find the midi input device that your keyboard in plugged into, and connect it to a track (i.e. drag it over rightwards so that it has an arrow pointing to the track). Then make sure that this track is sending its output to a midi device or a soft-synth that can play things back.
If the edit is in e-to-e (end-to-end) mode, midi events from that input will be continuously forwarded to the track, and should be played. The button to toggle e-to-e mode is in the bottom-right of the screen near the transport controls.
If using soft-synths, you'll want to make sure the playback latency is as low as possible to make them quick to respond to keypresses.
It's possible to use
a looped record mode for recording midi. To do this, set your in
and out markers around the area to loop, turn on the 'loop'
option (bottom-right of the screen), connect a midi input device
to a track, and press record.
In loop mode, successive layers of midi input are overlaid on the
same new clips, so that, for instance, different drum sounds can
be played one at a time to build up a complex drum loop. After
the recording is stopped, pressing undo will undo each layer in
turn, so mistakes can be corrected without throwing away the
entire recording.
Midi input devices also have an option - 'merge into existing clips' - that means that midi recordings which overlap an existing midi clip will merge the contents of the two clips together into one big one.
An edit can show the time either in terms of bars/beats or minutes/seconds. Clicking the timecode button on the edit screen produces a menu that lets you select the type that's being displayed.
This menu also lets you pop up the tempo dialogue box, which is irrelevant for minutes/seconds mode, but in bars/beats, this lets you adjust the time signature and tempo. When adjusting the tempo, you can choose whether to rescale all the clips in the edit to match the new tempo, or to leave it everything as it is and just change the way timecode is measured and displayed.
When moving clips and other items around, their start times can optionally be set to snap to the nearby intervals; snapping can be turned on/off with the button on the transport controls (bottom-right of the screen). The intervals to which things snap will depend on the timecode type, and the current zoom level - so if zoomed right out, things might snap to the nearest bar, but when zoomed in, it might be to the nearest 1/32 beat.
If you have a wave file that's been looped accurately, select it and click the 'auto-tempo' button in the clip's properties. This will be let you choose a tempo based on the clip's length and number of beats/bars it contains, (and can also use the size of the marked region instead of the clip's length).
Clicking the 'click' button (on the transport controls, bottom-right of the screen) will toggle the click-track. To get extra click-track options, hit the 'click track' button at the bottom-left of the screen.
All audio clips have fades-in/out that can be moved by selecting the clip and dragging the small icons at their ends. The shape of fade can be changed in the clip's properties.
If you have two clips that overlap on the same track, and you want to create a crossfade in the overlapping region, just select one of the clips and press the clip's 'auto-crossfade' button.
Instead of pasting in multiple copies of the same clip, you can select an audio clip, and press its 'loop this clip' button. When a clip has been looped, you can trim its length to any size you need, and its contents are looped to fill the gap.
To trim the length of the internal loop, select the clip and drag the vertical white bars left and right to stretch the loop length. To slip the loop without changing its length, drag one of these bars with the ctrl key held down.
When a clip is selected, you can use its 'speed' setting to change its playback speed. This can be combined with its 'keep original pitch' toggle button to time-stretch it.
To stretch a clip, you can also drag its start/end trimming controls with the alt key held down, which will stretch either the start or end of the clip without moving the other end.
To pitch-shift a clip, you can also use the built-in pitch-shift filter, either dropping it onto the clip or its track.
Click on the master level meter (bottom-right of the edit screen) to select the master level controls. In the properties panel there are settings that let you set lengths and shapes for a master fade in/out. Master fades are shown in the time bar at the top of the screen as a line or curve.
When an edit has a lot of filters and starts to need more cpu than is available, Tracktion has a facility called track freezing that can allow some of the tracks to be automatically pre-rendered whilst allowing them to be un-frozen later and changed.
To freeze part of an edit, select those tracks that you're not currently working on, and in the track properties, press the 'freeze' button. This will take a moment to render the tracks, and they will be shrunk on-screen to indicate that they're currently uneditable. The edit should, however, still play back as before, with the difference that the output of any filters and soft-synths in these tracks will have been rendered, so scrubbing may sound a little different.
To un-freeze one or more tracks, just select them and click the 'unfreeze' button.
Edits are auto-saved periodically while open (the frequency of auto-saves can be changed on the 'miscellaneous' section of the settings screen) so that if the power fails, the last saved state will be restored. An edit can also be saved manually, by clicking on the 'save/revert' button (or pressing ctrl-S).
Before closing an edit, however, you'll be asked if you want to save, which will commit the changes you've made since the last manual save. If you choose to discard the changes, (or click the 'save/revert' button at any time during editing and select 'revert'), the edit will be returned to the state it was in the last time it was manually saved - any intervening auto-saves will be thrown away.
This system means that it's possible to open an edit and mess around with it without losing the ability to throw these changes away, but it also provides the reassurance of regular auto-saves while doing this.
Click the 'export' button on the edit screen, and select 'create an audio file..' to get the rendering options.
This dialogue box lets you change:
When the rendering has finished, the finished audio file will be added to the project as a new clip - to play it, go back to the project screen and it should be the first item in the project.
The most flexible way of doing this is as for normal rendering, where tracks and marked regions can be selected. This will create
If you want to render one or more tracks and replace them with their rendered versions, you can press the 'render track' button on a track's properties, which will do just this.
On the project screen, select an edit, and in its properties, press the 'create a copy' button.
Tracktion has a few useful built-in destructive editing operations that can be performed on wave files.
To do them, go to the project screen, and select an audio clip from the list. In its properties panel there is an 'edit audio file' button. As well as giving you the option to launch an external wave editor, this has a 'basic editing operations' option.
On the dialogue this produces, you can choose from:
Each of these has its own options, but all will act on the wave file directly, so they can't be undone, and any edits that use this file will be affected.
Tracktion can record any movements of filter parameters that you make while an edit is playing, and replay these movements in time with the edit. It also lets you view these movements as curves which you can edit manually, moving and adding points.
Each track has a small 'A' button at its right-hand-side, which is used to select an automation curve to display on that track. This button can be clicked to show a list of available parameters, or the button can be dragged-and-dropped onto the filter whose parameter you're interested in viewing. As well as dragging this onto a filter, you can also drag it onto a parameter slider itself if one is currently shown in the properties panel. Items that are suitable for automation will change colour as you drag over them.
When a curve is displayed on a track, the line can be clicked to select the curve and show its properties in the properties panel. To edit a curve manually, you can:
Once a parameter has a curve attached to it, every time the cursor moves, the parameter will be updated to follow the curve. To un-automate a parameter, select the curve and choose the 'delete all points' option.
For recording the live changes made to a parameter during playback, there is an automation control button at the top-right of the screen. Click on this 'A' button will enable/disable recording (there's also a keyboard shortcut for this). Clicking to the right of this button will show a menu of other automation options.
The steps involved in recording live movements are:
After punching-out, the recorded data will appear in the curve (if it's visible) and can be edited manually.
Sections of automation curves can be copied/pasted around. To copy a section of a curve to the clipboard:
..and then to paste this into a curve:
There is also an option in the properties panel to paste a section of curve so that it gets stretched to fit between the in and out markers.
Tracktion provides a basic set of built-in filters. Unlike plug-in filters, these are tightly integrated with the user interface, and are guaranteed to be available on any other Tracktion system to which an archive is taken.
Unlike most other non-linear audio software, Tracktion doesn't have hard-wired volume and pan controls for tracks, so these are treated as filters. The advantages of this are that in a track's output, you can freely move the volume about to go before or after filters, and even have multiple volume controls at different stages in the filter pipeline.
Clicking-and-dragging in the central rectangular area of a volume filter will pop-up a floating volume control to let you drag the level up and down; clicking-and-dragging on the horizontal bar will let you drag the panning left and right. Both of these areas change colour as the mouse moves over them to make it clear what'll happen when you click.
To pick up the volume filter and move it to another place, click-and-drag at its very edge and it can be moved like any other filter.
Rather than hard-wiring level meters into each track, level meters are implemented as filters. This means that they can be moved around to any point in the filter chain where you want to monitor the level, or multiple ones can be placed in the same track, or they can even be deleted altogether where they're not needed.
Clicking on a level meter gives you a more accurate view of the levels, and right-clicking on the big level meter view will provide a choice of different monitoring styles (peak, RMS or sum-and-difference).
When the levels entering a level meter peak, a red marker appears at the top of the meter, and will remain until cleared by clicking somewhere inside the meter.
Tracktion provides a basic built-in sampler. Nothing very fancy about its features, but one big advantage is that when you create an archive of an edit that uses one of these samplers, all the samples it needs will be automatically compressed, trimmed and exported in the archive in the same way that normal audio clips are.
To add samples to a sampler, you can either click it's 'add' button, copy-and-paste clips into it, or drag-and-drop audio files from Windows Explorer.
Selecting one of the samples from the list will then let you assign it to a range of midi notes, adjust its root note, and its volume and pan. Samples can also be set to 'ignore release' mode, which means that once started, each sample will be allowed to play to its end even if the midi key that triggered it is released.
Below the keyboard is a basic small waveform view which lets you trim the portion of the file being used for the sample. To move its ends, click and drag either the start or end of this waveform.
A more accurate way to select a subsection of a file for sampling is to create a normal clip in an edit that is the exact length needed, then copy-and-paste this clip into the sampler.
The Tracktion built-in reverb is based on the open-source Freeverb plug-in, with a few bugfixes and enhancements for different sample rates.
Very straightforward 4-band e.q. - drag the circles around to change the parameters; two of the circles are band-pass filters, one is a high-pass and one is a low-pass. To reset a parameter drag it off the top of the window, and to reset them all, press the 'reset' button.
Phase inverting will simply invert the output signal, whether or not any equalisation parameters are active.
Very simple compressor, with all the parameters you'd expect.
A simple delay that benefits from being able to set the time based on multiples of the edit's tempo.
A basic pitch-shifter, using a phase-vocoder technique.
Simple chorus, all the usual parameters.
A seven-octave phaser with variable feedback.
Just a simple low/high pass cutoff filter, for times when the 4-band equaliser would be overkill.
To use Tracktion as a ReWire host, just drop the 'ReWire' filter into a track, as you would any other filter. The properties panel for this has options to choose a ReWire device (e.g. Reason, Ableton, etc), and a button to launch the device's user interface (N.B. not all devices respond to this button - some require you to start the other application manually).
Once a ReWire device has been selected, its properties panel will also let you choose which of the device's input and output channels should be connected to the inputs and outputs to the Tracktion filter. All midi messages that arrive at the filter will be sent to the midi bus/channel that is selected, and the output from the device's two selected ReWire channels will be used as the filter's output.
Multiple ReWire filters for the same device can be placed into multiple tracks, each using different subsets of the devices output channels.
A few things to bear in mind when using ReWire:
The settings screen (click the 'settings' tab at the top of the screen) has a category for 'audio devices', which lists all the audio devices available, and lets you enable/disable them and adjust their properties.
There are three categories - DirectSound devices, ASIO devices, and MIDI devices. Each device in the list is either marked as 'active' or 'disabled' - clicking on this button will toggle it.
Tracktion expects there to be a default audio output device, and (optionally) a default midi output device. The output devices that are active have a 'wave default' or 'midi default' button down the right-hand side of the screen, and it there is more than one possibilty, you can click these to choose the best device for your system.
The default device will be used for playing previews of wave files, playing CD audio, etc., and when a track's destination is set to be the 'default wave output' this is where that track's audio goes.
On the devices screen, when a device in the list is active, it can be clicked to select it. The device's property-panel will then show parameters for setting the sample rate, bit depth, etc., where appropriate.
One of the properties of an audio input or output device is its latency. This is the minimum time it takes for audio that the computer generates to make its way through the soundcard and into your ears.
Low latencies make the system more responsive, especially when playing soft-synthesisers using a live midi input, but also make it harder for the computer to keep up and make it more likely to glitch. Different soundcards will impose different limits on the latencies that are possible.
To experiment with latencies, select an audio input/output device on the devices screen, adjust its latency parameter, and then see how smoothly audio can be played back. It's probably a good idea to settle for the lowest value that doesn't produce any glitches during normal use.
To make very low latencies work properly it'll probably be necessary to turn on realtime priority mode.
This option will put Tracktion into 'realtime' mode, which means that it is allowed to use more of the computer's resources for playback. When using very small latencies, this can make a big difference, but when Tracktion starts using too much cpu, is can make the system a big clunky and unresponsive to the mouse.
This option is found on the 'audio devices' section of the settings screen.
Tracktion will attempt to make sure recordings are in-sync with the playback as far as possible, and for ASIO devices this is normally possible. With a lot of DirectSound drivers, however, the accuracy may vary by a few milliseconds.
If an audio input device is selected on the settings screen or the edit screen, one of its properties called 'time adjust' can be altered for manual sync adjustment. This is a time by which new recordings will be shifted to compensate for any other delays there might be in the signal chain. To automatically calculate a value for this setting by playing some test audio signals and measuring the delay for it to come back in, click the 'auto-detect' button and follow the instructions on-screen.
When an audio input device is selected on the devices screen (or the edit screen), amongst its properties is a directory in which new files should be created. Unless this parameter is explicitly set, it will default to be the directory containing the currently open project.
Also in these properties is a prefix from which new filenames are created, and the name of the next file that will be created, so that this can be explicitly set if required.
Tracktion allocates an amount of memory for caching audio data from disk. The 'miscellaneous' section of the settings screen contains an option to change this size, and the bigger it is, the more efficient the disk access will be (as long as your PC has enough memory to handle this). For most purposes, the automatic values should be fine.
Tracktion needs temporary disk space to hold thumbnails, frozen track files, and other intermediate files. By default it tries to create a temporary directory in the same directory as the Tracktion executable. If you want to use a different disk or directory for this, it can be changed on the 'miscellaneous' section of the settings screen.
On the the settings screen there's a 'plugins' section, which contains a list of paths in which Tracktion will look for VST plugins, and a button to re-scan the paths if you change them. It also has a section for listing files that are ignored, so that troublesome or unwanted plugins can be excluded without needing to delete the actual dll's from disk.
Various global settings are treated as 'user settings' - meaning that they can be imported and exported in a user-preferences file. The kind of items in the user settings include:
To import and export them as a .trksettings file, use the options in the 'miscellaneous' section of the settings screen.