User guide
Tracktion 4 Reference Manual
39
Record mode: This option controls how the recorded material is added to the edit. There are three
modes (Fig. 2.1.3):
• Overlay newly recorded clips onto edit: When this option is selected, recorded audio clips will
be placed on top of the existing clips.
•
Replace old clips in edit with new ones: When this option is selected, new clips will delete
existing clips. The existing audio material will not be lost, however, and this operation is entirely
non-destructive.
•
Don’t make recordings from this device: Select this option if you need end-to-end capabil-
ity for this input, but do not wish to record from it. For example, if you are recording from one or
more inputs and wish to monitor signal on another input, but don’t want recordings to be made
from it at the current time, you can use this option.
Filename: You can create custom le-name patterns for recorded audio. The le name pattern denes
both where recorded audio les will be stored, and what they will be called. The default setting for
this eld ensures that recorded audio is stored in the project folder, and is named for the track it was
recorded on. The reset lename button will restore this default for you. The rst part of the pattern
“%projectdir%” tells Tracktion that you want to store the recorded audio in the same directory as the
project. You could replace this value with an absolute path, such as “d:\recordings”.
The following special patterns can be used:
%projectdir% = this is replaced by the current project’s “Recorded Audio” folder.
%edit% = this is replaced by the name of the edit.
%track% = this is replaced by the name of the track.
%date% = this is replaced by the current date as DDMMYYYY.
%time% = this is replaced by the current time as HHMMSS.
%take% = this is replaced by the number of recording takes.
File format: You can select whether Tracktion stores recorded audio as a “broadcast wav”, “aiff”, “ac”
or “wave 64” format le. If you choose to store the audio as a wav le, Tracktion will insert an industry
standard BWAV time-stamp. This allows audio to be quickly aligned to its original position, without af-
fecting compatibility with any other software in which you might access your recorded audio. If you
choose the FLAC option, Tracktion will store the audio using lossless compression, giving typically
50% smaller le sizes with no loss of quality. The wave64 option is particularly useful if you are mak-
ing very long recordings (typically more than one to two hours, depending on the bit depth and sample
rate). Standard wav and aiff les can only support audio les up to 2GB in size. Wave64, on the other
hand, provides support for extremely long recordings, but it is not quite so widely supported by other
applications as the more mainstream wav and aiff types. Since you can export your audio in any format,
choosing Wave 64 is generally the safest approach unless disk space is limited, in which case FLAC
might be a good choice.
Bit depth:
You can select the bit depth to use for the saved audio. Note, this does not set the recording
resolution for the audio input. The bit-depth that the signal is recorded at is determined by the audio driv-
ers for the input device. This setting only affects the format of the audio le that is stored to disc. If your
input device can only record at 16-bit, setting the bit-depth to anything higher than 16-bit will therefore
not produce any benets.
Figure 2.1.3