3 · The Interface

This chapter is a tour of the controls that are always on screen: the transport bar, the navigator, and the two main views.

The transport bar

The transport bar runs across the top of the window in both Edit and Mix views. Its arrangement follows the space actually available in the window, not the device name:

• Full — at roomy widths, all primary and secondary controls appear in one row.
• Condensed — as the window narrows, EDIT / MIX stays immediately to the left of the transport buttons. Meter, loop, count-in, metronome, status, and session commands move into one ☰ Transport and Session menu before anything can clip or overlap.
• Stacked — at the narrowest widths, the transport essentials stay on the first row and the full-width EDIT / MIX control moves below them. If needed, the inline tempo field also moves into the menu.

This applies while resizing a Mac window, using iPad multitasking or a floating iPad window, and rotating or resizing an iPhone layout. Visible toolbar buttons keep the same compact height in every arrangement; iPhone and iPad add a larger invisible touch target without making the controls look oversized. On supported iPadOS versions, the bar reserves leading room for window controls only while those controls are actually present.

At full width, from left to right, the bar contains:

View toggle — EDIT / MIX

Switches between the timeline and the mixing console.

Transport buttons

• Return to start (⏮) — jump the playhead to the beginning.
• Play / Stop (Space) — start or stop playback. The button shows a stop icon while playing.
• Record (R) — start recording on all armed tracks. Turns red while recording, orange while counting in. It's disabled until at least one track is armed.

Position display

Shows the playhead's current location. Tap it to switch between:

• MM:SS — minutes, seconds, hundredths (clock time).
• BAR:BEAT — musical position (bar.beat.subdivision), based on your tempo and meter.

Tempo & meter

• BPM — the session tempo. Click/tap it to open a dialog and type a new value (20–999 BPM).
• METER — the time signature (e.g. 4/4, 3/4, 6/8, 7/8…). Pick from the menu.

Changing tempo or meter while the metronome is running re-locks the click to the new grid instantly.

Toggle buttons

• Loop (L) — turn loop playback on/off (see Loop below).
• Count-In — play a count of empty bars before recording starts. Right-click / long-press to choose 1, 2, or 4 bars.
• Metronome — the click track. Right-click / long-press for Record Only, which makes the click play only while recording, not during normal playback.

Tracking safety indicator

A small status pill showing IDLE / MON / REC plus an estimate of your monitoring latency in milliseconds. The dot is green for low latency, orange for moderate, red for high — a quick glance tells you whether your buffer settings are tight enough for comfortable recording. On a Mac, hovering it shows how many tracks are armed and monitored. (Latency is configured in Audio Settings.)

System resource badge

Next to the tracking indicator, small chips show how hard the app is working right now. The readings refresh about once a second.

• DSP — the audio engine's load: how much of each buffer's deadline the real-time audio thread is using. This is the one that predicts glitches. It can read over 100%, which means the audio can't be computed in time and you will hear dropouts (it sits near 0% when nothing is playing). If it's red, raise the buffer size in Audio Settings, bypass heavy inserts/plug-ins, or bounce tracks.
• CPU — the app's processor use in the same terms as Activity Monitor: 100% means one full core, so on a multi-core Mac it can read well above 100% (e.g. 220% ≈ two cores busy). Its color reflects headroom on the whole machine, so a big number can still be green.
• Memory — the app's live memory footprint, shown in MB, or GB past 1 GB.

Each chip is colored like a traffic light: green comfortable, amber climbing, red running hot. On iPhone and iPad the memory color tracks how close the app is to the system's per-app limit, so red is an early warning to free memory before iOS quits the app. On a Mac, hovering the badge shows the full reading.

Why DSP can be red while CPU looks calm: audio runs against a tiny deadline (e.g. a 128-sample buffer at 48 kHz is only 2.7 ms). AnalogDAW spreads the mix across the machine's performance cores, so a red DSP chip means the allotted audio cores are missing that deadline, even if whole-machine CPU still looks comfortable. Watch DSP, not CPU, to judge whether playback will be clean.

This badge appears inline whenever the full arrangement fits. In condensed and stacked arrangements, its space is reclaimed for the essential controls.

Main menu / Transport and Session menu (☰)

The home for session commands: Undo/Redo, New/Open, the full Save group, Add Track / Add Bus / Add Marker, Import Audio, Export, Snapshots, Templates, Session Settings, Audio Settings, and exporting a diagnostic bundle. In the condensed and stacked arrangements, the same ☰ menu also contains meter, return-to-start, loop, count-in and its length, metronome and its recording-only option, plus tempo whenever the inline tempo field cannot fit.

The navigator (minimap)

Just below the transport bar is the navigator — a zoomed-out map of the entire session. It shows a miniature of every track's clips, color-coded to match the tracks.

• Tap or drag anywhere on it to move the playhead (scrub) there.
• The loop region appears as a highlighted band with draggable handles when loop is enabled.
• Markers appear as colored flags.
• Right-click / long-press for: Enable/Disable Loop, Create Marker at Playhead, and Set Timeline Length….

Setting the timeline length

By default the timeline extends comfortably to fit your content. Use Set Timeline Length… to fix an explicit length in bars — useful for arranging to a known song length. The timeline never shrinks below what's needed to hold all your clips, markers, and the loop.

Markers

Markers are named, colored flags at points in time — use them for song sections (Verse, Chorus, Drop) or edit points.

• Add a marker at the playhead: press M, or ☰ ▸ Add Marker, or right-click the navigator.
• Rename, delete, or Set Loop Start / Set Loop End to a marker: right-click / long-press the marker flag.
• Markers can also define an export range — see Exporting.

The loop

The loop plays a region over and over. Turn it on with the Loop button or L.

• Set the region by dragging the loop handles in the navigator (or on the timeline ruler), or by snapping the start/end to a marker.
• Loop is also used for loop recording to stack takes (see Takes & Comping) and for exporting just the loop region (see Exporting).

The timeline (Edit view)

The Edit view is where you arrange and edit. It has:

• A time ruler at the top showing bars/beats (and a context menu for edits at a clicked time).
• A track header column on the left — each track's name, color, controls, arm/mute/solo, and a mini fader/pan.
• The track lanes with your clips (waveforms).
• An optional channel strip inspector on the left edge: select a track and its full channel strip appears, alongside the strip of the bus or master it feeds — just like sitting in front of the console for that channel. It always opens on the INS section (input, preamp, and insert slots), then keeps whichever section you pick — switch to DYN and click through your tracks and every one of them shows DYN. Close the inspector and open it again and you are back at INS.

The timeline toolbar (top-right of the ruler) holds the edit tools, ripple edit, snap, follow playhead, and zoom — all covered in Editing Clips.

The mixer (Mix view)

The Mix view shows your whole session as a mixing console: a row of vertical channel strips. Track strips, then mix buses, aux returns, cue buses, VCA groups, and the master on the right. Each strip can show its Dynamics, EQ, Inserts, or Sends section. See Mixing and The Audio Processors.

Next: Tracks & the Channel Strip →