User guide

Tracktion 4 Reference Manual
183
Chapter 9: Rack Filters
Chapter Contents.
9.1 : What Are Rack Filters?
Track Spanning: Learning To Share
Building Blocks: A Modular World
9.2 : Working With Rack Filters
The Rack Filter Editor
9.3 : How To Build Rack Filters
Building A Rack By Hand
The Handy Wrap / Unwrap Tool — Using Racks As Channel Strips
9.4 : Racks, Tracks, Inputs, And Outputs
9.5 : Working With Multiple Output VSTis
The Track Spanning Approach
The Modular Approach
9.1 : What Are Rack Filters?
If you have so far been amazed at how intuitive and instantly obvious Tracktion is to use, rack lters
may come as a bit of a shock. They aren’t difcult to use as such, but it may not be immediately appar-
ent how to use them; indeed you may not even be all that clear as to what they actually do. Don’t worry,
they really are easy to understand and use with a just little hands on demonstration.
You should by now be familiar with the aux send and aux return lters; if you have not already en-
countered these lters, it may be benecial to go back and review the discussion on them in Chapter
Six before reading further. Just like aux sends, racks can take audio from a number of tracks, and just
like aux returns, racks can inject that audio into another track. In fact, at their core, the aux send and
aux return lters are basically stripped down rack lters.
Rack lters have two dening characteristics; rstly they can span a number of tracks, and secondly
they provide a modular surface upon which you can potentially create completely new effects and syn-
thesizers.
Track Spanning: Learning To Share
So what does it mean to span tracks? It is probably easier
to show this than to describe it, so let’s do a quick experiment
with racks. Add a new lter to track one of an empty edit, and
when prompted for a lter to insert, open the folder called
“Rack Filters,” followed by the sub-folder “new from preset,”
and select the “Stereo Pass Thru” lter inside (Fig. 9.1.1).
Next, repeat this process to add the “Stereo Pass Thru” rack
to track two as well. Finally, lower the main output level for
Tracktion to at least –6 dB. Really, this last step is worth it!
Load an audio le onto track one, or send it some audio
from one of your input devices, and watch the level meters for both tracks one and two (Fig. 9.1.2).
What is happening here is that rather than tracks one and two having their own copy of a lter, as would
normally be the case, both tracks are actually sharing the same rack lter. Essentially this is the same
thing that happens with the standard aux send and aux return lters, but racks let you take things a step
or two further as shall see throughout the remainder of this chapter.
Figure 9.1.1