Tracks

The track header

Track headers live in the column at the right edge of the Arrangement and grow more controls as you make the lane taller (everything stays reachable; nothing important hides behind a submenu). A new track opens tall enough to show the whole card — ribbon, wells and routing — so nothing on this list is hidden until you deliberately shrink the lane.

Each header is a slab of smoked glass, the same material as a mixer strip. The card carries no colour; the track's own colour is light on it — a lit strip across the top of the card, the value readouts, and whichever keys are engaged. There is a small gap to its neighbours, so the column reads as a stack of separate channels rather than one sheet. A selected track wears a white ring (brighter on the one the device dock is following); a group bus floods its name bar with the family colour and lights its name in the same colour. Recolour a track (right-click ▸ Colour) and its light follows.

1. ⏻ Power — at the left of every name bar, even when folded. This is a true processing on/off for the track (the track drops out of the render graph), not a mute. Switched off, the whole channel drains its colour and fades — but the switch itself does not fade with it: it keeps a hairline body and an ink picked to read against the bar it sits on (white on a bus's coloured band), so the way back is always findable.
2. Name bar — a smoked band across the top of the card under the lit strip, the name in white. A name too long for the head is cut rather than shortened with dots — hover it to read the whole thing. Double-click it to rename in place (⌘R does the same for the selected track). The engineer follows the rename: the track's devices, sends, group, duck keys and undo history keep working under the new name, and the audio file on disk is left as it was. Group buses and FX returns rename here too — their name IS their id, so everything pointing at them (members, nested outputs, every send) moves with it. Only the Master refuses: its name is its routing identity. The ▾/▸ triangle at its right end folds the track (or, on a group bus header, folds the whole group's member list).
3. Control ribbon [M] [S] [●] [❄] — Mute, Solo, Record-arm, and Freeze. Freeze (aqua-tinted) commits the track's processing to audio to save CPU; unfreeze restores the live chain. Each is a raised key you can press; a key that cannot apply here (freeze on a track routed into a bus, record on a bus) keeps its place in the row but loses its cap and is greyed out, and its tooltip says why.
4. PAN · DB · WID — drag a cell vertically to edit pan, gain, or stereo width (hold ⇧ for fine steps; double-click to reset). A return track is one compact row: [M] [S] beside its PAN · DB well (returns have no record-arm, freeze or width).
5. Automation target dropdown — appears while Automation Mode is on; shows and picks which parameter the lane is displaying (see the Automation chapter).
6. Send deck — one recessed panel under the wells holding a knob per FX return (A, B, C…), the mixer strip's flat disc with the arc in the return's colour, in rows of up to four across the card. Under every knob a small readout shows its letter and its level (−∞ until you turn it up, then the value in the return's colour). Drag vertically (⇧ fine); the value also shows in a bubble while you turn it; double-click types a value; ⌥-double-click turns the send off. When there are more sends than fit, the extra rows collapse into a "+N SENDS" pill.
7. Output routing ("→ Master ▾") — the deck's last row, centred under the knobs; routes the track to the Master or to any group bus. Same key as the mixer strip's foot, in the same backlit glass as the [M][S][●][❄] row above it, and labelled in the track's own colour — live, so recolouring a track moves both. The label is at full strength at all times. The key still answers the pointer with the same faint glass wash every other key on the card uses. A group's stays neutral: on a group the token says where the sum goes and the family hue is already the card's loudest mark. At the default lane height the routing row shows on its own (the send rows need a taller lane); shrink the lane further and it drops away.
8. Live level meter — a slim meter with peak-hold on the card's right edge (the same ballistics as the mixer strip's meter: a 1.5 s hold line, a 3 s clip latch; click the meter to reset both).

Folded tracks are never blind. A 24-px folded lane still shows an S badge when soloed, an M badge when muted, the live dB value, a miniature level meter, and a red corner tick when record-armed.

Group headers invert. A group bus's header row fills solid with the group's colour and draws its name in dark ink, reading "NAME · N" with its member count; member tracks stay normal cards tinted in the family colour. While any group exists, a thin gutter runs down the right edge of the header column with a drawn bracket embracing each group's members — you can see grouping at a glance even with everything folded. Click that bracket to fold or unfold the group, exactly as you would its twin along the foot of the mixer.

The master row is a real header row pinned at the bottom with its own PAN/DB wells, automation dropdown, and meter — but no power, mute, solo, arm, or freeze.

Track operations

• Select — click a header. Shift-click selects a contiguous range; ⌘-click toggles individual tracks in and out of the selection. Selecting a track clears any clip selection (and vice versa) — this decides what ⌘D, ⌘C and Delete act on.
• Delete — Delete key, or right-click ▸ Delete track / Remove bus. With several tracks selected it removes all of them in one undo step (the menu item says Delete N tracks so the label matches what happens); deleting a single track is its own undo step, and the next track is auto-selected so repeated presses walk down the list. Group busses and returns are dissolved one at a time — select one on its own for that.
• Duplicate — right-click ▸ Duplicate track (duplicates the whole multi-selection if you clicked inside one), or ⌘D with a track header focused. The copy carries everything: clips, devices, gain/pan/width, sends, colour, automation rides, and group membership, and gets an incremented name. It sounds like its source from the first block. Note that a copy playing the same audio at the same time as its source adds +6 dB to the sum — that is how two identical signals add, in any DAW. New projects carry a safety limiter on the master that catches the sum at −1 dBTP (the top bar says so when a new project opens; the Engineer panel stays on its welcome console); if you removed it (the CLIP lamp / ⌥⌘L, or the preference), mind your monitoring level before duplicating a hot track.
• Reorder — drag a header vertically. (Pinned return lanes and the Master don't reorder.)
• Everything acts on the whole selection. Mute, solo, record-arm, the colour picker, and dragging a lane's height all apply to every selected track when you use them on a track that's in the selection — the clicked track's new state drives the rest, so a half-muted selection lands all-muted or all-unmuted rather than each track flipping its own way. Use the same control on a track outside the selection and it acts alone, as always. Group-bus lanes keep their own height during a group resize.
• Recolour — the track menu ends in an embedded palette: 70 swatches plus a row of the skin accents; one click picks and closes. A footer toggle recolours the whole group at once, and recolouring a bus always cascades to its members. A brand-new group — whether you made it with ⌘G or the agent made it for you — starts out in the colour of its topmost member, cascaded across the bus, every member, the gutter spine and the mixer wall, so a group reads as one family from the moment it exists.
• Copy/paste whole tracks — ⌘C/⌘X/⌘V with a track selected copies the track itself (there is one clipboard: copying a clip replaces a copied track and vice versa, and a copied device replaces both — ⌘V pastes whichever you copied last). Pasting into the same project duplicates or restores the track; pasting into a different open project imports it wholesale, audio files included.
• Group / ungroup — ⌘G groups the selection into a bus. Right-click the bus ▸ Remove bus dissolves it and re-homes members to the Master.
• Fold a group — the bus header's triangle, or U with the bus selected; ⌥U unfolds all groups.
• Resize — drag a lane's bottom edge (24 px minimum, 420 px maximum). ⌥+ / ⌥− grow/shrink the selected lanes (or all lanes) about 12 % per press; ⌥-scroll over a lane zooms its height. Double-click a header to fold to 24 px and back. Return lanes resize from their TOP edge (drag it up to grow, like the Master row): the return band hangs from the Master row, so a return can only grow upward — ⌥-scroll follows that edge too (scroll up = taller).
• Fit — H equal-fills all stem lanes into the visible area once (it never re-zooms behind your back afterwards); W fits the whole song horizontally. Both also exist as hardware-style W/H buttons in the corner cluster at the bottom-left of the arrangement.
• Split into stems (AI) — right-click an audio track ▸ Split into stems (AI) runs local AI stem separation on the track's audio (2 or 4 stems — vocals, drums, bass, other) and lands each as a new track. Runs in the background; see the Import chapter.

Freeze

Freeze (❄ on the ribbon) renders a track's chain to audio and disables live processing — the classic CPU saver. Groups can be frozen whole. The agent can freeze and unfreeze too (track.freeze), and always sees which tracks are frozen.

A track that plays into another track can't be frozen on its own. Freeze the bus it plays into instead, which freezes the whole group in one go. The ❄ key is greyed out wherever that applies — on every stem routed into a bus, and on a bus nested inside another bus — and its tooltip says so. The Master has no ribbon keys at all: mute, solo, record and freeze are all meaningless there.