User guide

Tracktion 4 Reference Manual
96
4.1 : An Overview Clips
Understanding Clips
When you record or import audio/MIDI content into Tracktion, it will be presented in the edit page as
a clip. These clips provide tools for editing and working with your audio and MIDI parts, and are a con-
venient way to arrange audio and MIDI parts into a song.
One of the most useful, and most fundamental, aspects of clips is that you can edit and resize them
non-destructively.
To understand what this means, lets consider an audio clip, as this immediately brings us to one
important detail that should be addressed before we move on: An audio clip doesn’t actually contain
any audio! Instead of thinking of the audio as part of the clip, it is more accurate to imagine the clip as
a window onto the audio le. What does that mean? Well, picture a piece of cardboard with a square
cut out of it. If you lay that piece of card on a page of text you will only be able to see the text that is ex-
posed by the hole, and as such, you will only be able to see a small region of the page at any one time.
Here the hole can be seen to be a window, and the text you can see through it is determined entirely by
the position and size of that window.
Now consider the clip to be a window, just like the piece of card. Just as the visible region of text is
not part of the card, equally the audio shown in a clip is not part of the clip; it is just an individual le that
the clip is acting as a window onto.
By changing the size of a clip, you can show or hide as much of an audio le as you want. Figure
4.1.1 shows an audio clip displaying just the middle section of an audio le. By adjusting the offset of
the clip in relation to the audio le, you can control which part of the audio is showing through the clip
window.
A single audio le may be used by many different clips in a single edit, and each clip may not only be
showing different sections of the le, but even applying unique processes to it.
What “non-destructive editing” basically means then, is that splitting, trimming, and resizing clips,
does not affect the underlying audio le, or MIDI data, in any way. If you shorten a clip, some of its con-
tents may appear to be lost, but if you then set it back to its original size, the contents will still be there.
In short, any changes you make to a clip’s size are only as permanent as you want them to be. Not only
does this provide for an extraordinarily exible way of working, it can also bring great peace of mind
when making experimental edits to audio and MIDI clips.
Figure 4.1.1