Clips

A clip is a portion of the audio or MIDI data in a track that is bounded by a vertical line on each end of the clip. You can click a clip to select it—a selected clip becomes highlighted. After you select a clip, you can copy it, drag it to a new location, delete it, or use any command in the Edit menu to alter it. A clip can be any size. A clip that is an exact number of beats or measures and is suitable for repetition, such as a drum pattern, is frequently called a loop. Clips are also sometimes called events. A track can have no clips (no data at all), one clip (all the track’s data is in one clip), or many clips. Having lots of clips in a track increases processing time for your computer.

In the following picture, the Split tool was used to separate the audio in Track 1 into three clips. You can activate the Split tool by pressing F8 on your keyboard, at which time the cursor turns into a small scissors icon. After you activate the Split tool, you can click the track data at the points where you want to split it into clips.

A. Clips

You can rearrange the sound in both audio and MIDI tracks by dragging and/or copying clips. The precision of the clips’ movement is governed by the Snap to Grid button , which you can configure in the Control Bar’s Snap module. Additional snap settings are available in Edit > Preferences > Customization - Snap to Grid. In the following picture, the clips in Track 1 have been moved around to reverse their order, so instead of the first three notes of Three Blind Mice, we now have Mice Blind Three.

A. Mice B. Blind C. Three

For more information, see:

Track-by-track playback

Connecting an instrument, home stereo, or microphone to your sound card

Choosing inputs

Audio recording

Audio hardware (sound cards) and drivers

MIDI