Features Studio Pricing Docs — Studio Docs — Perform Docs — Music Player Docs Tunings Reference Compare Blog About Support
↓ Download iOS / iPadOS macOS visionOS Companion App

The Console

The console is the mixer, turned into a row of strips you can reach while the song plays. Live is always the first strip, and it is wider. Every layer follows, in order, in its own color. Scroll sideways when they do not fit.

A fader or a knob in your hand holds the row still. Let go and it scrolls again. That is so a level move does not turn into a swipe to the next strip.

The Live strip

The header reads MONITOR. It is the arm for hearing the input, and it is covered in The Live Channel. Orange is monitoring. Red is a take in progress.

Under that: a pan knob, a meter, a fader, and the mute key. There is no track number. Live is not a layer.

The meter moves when you are monitoring or recording. It is the same meter the recorder puts on a channel strip.

A layer strip

Top to bottom:

  • A lamp in the layer’s color. It dims when the strip is silent.
  • The channel number, then the name. In a performance, tap the name for Rename, Replace Audio, and Remove Layer. A recorded loop says Clear Loop instead of remove. You cannot clear one while a take is recording. Replacing the audio makes it a whole file again: any loop length it had is gone.
  • Pan, and on a performance the crossfade key beside it.
  • A meter and a fader.
  • Mute, and on a performance the repeat key beside it.

Stem Play has no rename, no replace, no repeat, no crossfade. Those layers are the song.

The meter moves while the song is playing, and sits still when the strip is muted or soloed out.

Fader

Grab the cap. A swipe across the track of the fader, off the cap, scrolls the console instead of changing level. That is deliberate.

Drag the cap for the level. The throw is the full height of the strip. Double-tap the cap to come back to unity.

Slide your finger sideways off the fader while you are dragging and the same vertical move counts for less. Further off to the side, finer the level. Come back toward the fader and it gets coarse again, without the cap jumping. There is a tick in the hand for each percent, so a slow move is a series of steps rather than a smear.

The scale marks on the fader are unity, three quarters, half, a quarter, and off. Unity is the longer mark.

Pan

The knob above the fader. Drag right, or up, to pan right. Drag left, or down, to pan left. It settles on center as you pass it, and a double-tap puts it back there.

On a performance, the small key beside the knob is crossfade. On, which is the default for a recorded loop, each pass fades in over a short pre-roll and rings out through the tail that was kept past the end of the take. A delay or a note you left ringing has somewhere to go. Off, the passes meet at the cut. On an imported file that is already the whole song, there is no tail past the end, so the key has little to do. It earns its place on loops. See Recording.

Mute and solo

They share one key, because a row of strips this narrow cannot spare two.

  • Tap to mute. The key lights amber and reads M. Tap again to unmute.
  • Hold to solo. The key turns green and reads S. Every other strip, including Live, goes silent. Tap the key to clear the solo.
  • One solo at a time. Soloing another strip moves it. There is no solo-in-place group.

A muted strip, or a strip silenced because something else is soloed, dims its lamp and its fader. The fader position is remembered. Unmute, or clear the solo, and the level is where you left it.

Solo is how you hear one ring. When you share a take With the Song, that file uses these faders, and a solo is everyone else at zero, so clear it first if you wanted the whole song in the file. With Your Sound is the take on its own, at full level, and ignores the strip. See Recording.

Repeat

The key under mute, on a performance. On, the layer repeats on its own length inside the song. A one-bar loop comes around every bar, for as long as the song is. Off, it plays once each time the song starts, and waits for the song to come back around.

A loop you just recorded has this on. An imported file has it off. For a file that already fills the whole song, on and off sound the same: one pass is the song. The key matters when the layer is shorter than what is around it.

Empty strips

A performance shows empty strips marked LOAD until you fill them. Four are out from the start, so a deck with nothing on it still looks like a place you can put a song. Once four layers are loaded, one empty strip stays at the end, until the tenth.

Tap LOAD to pick one or more audio files. Playback pauses first, so a file does not land under a moving playhead and surprise you. Each file becomes a layer, named from the file, on the next free ring.

Ten is the limit. The engine’s playback tracks for layers run out there. Live occupies its own tracks beyond them, which is why the cap is ten layers and still one performer. Past ten, the deck tells you.

Loading a file you exported from the recorder is the ordinary way to build a deck out of a song you arranged. See Exporting Stems and Performances & Stem Play.