Audio Tracks

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The audio track is the most fundamental concept in a Digital Audio Workstation.  A typical track might be "kick drum", "lead vocal", "bass guitar", "sound effects", etc.

In a traditional analog recording studio, a track is a combination of a track on the tape, the tape machine playback/record head(s), and a mixing console strip.

An audio track is the place where audio is recorded into and played back from. The arrangement of regions of audio is stored in the track's playlist.  At any given time, every track has a playlist selected for it.  The playlist is the sequence of sound events (regions) for the track.  Whenever something is recorded into the track, a new region is added to it. Of course you can move regions from one track to another, or change their position within the track.

Normally each track will have a single playlist.   For the majority of audio engineering projects, only one playlist per track is sufficient.  However, there are times when you may choose to have more playlists than tracks.  This concept is often called "Takes" or "Virtual Tracks" in other software.

To create a new track select the menu Add Track/Bus from the main menu or Right-Click on the empty area left below the master track (or any other tracks you created previously).  Either of these options will open the Add Track/Bus Dialog.

When a track is added to the session it is given a default name based on the Track type. For example, the first audio track that is added to the session will be given the name Audio 1 and the first bus will be called Bus 1 and any subsequently added tracks will be consecutively numbered.

Track names determine the names of the files created when recording to a track.  For example, the resulting file inside the session might be called "Audio 1.wav"