Tracks & the Channel Strip
A track is the basic building block of a session. Each track has:
- a lane on the timeline where its audio clips live, and
- a channel strip in the mixer that shapes and routes its sound.
This chapter explains tracks and gives an overview of the channel strip. The individual processors are covered in detail in The Audio Processors, and the other kinds of strips (buses, master, etc.) in Channel Strip Types.
Adding and managing tracks
- Add a track: main menu ☰ ▸ Add Track.
- Rename: double-click a track's name in the timeline track header to open the Rename dialog. On a channel strip, rename from the strip's right-click / long-press menu ▸ Rename Track — the names on the strip (the colored plate at the top and the label under the fader) are displays only, because a click-to-rename there competed with the strip's selection and drag gestures. Renaming always opens a dialog; there is no inline typing anywhere. In the mixer, the colored name plate at the top of the strip is the strip's selection target: click to select, ⌘-click to add or remove, ⇧-click to range-select.
- Color: give a track a color to keep your session readable — clips, meters, and the minimap all pick up the color. Choose Automatic to let AnalogDAW assign a color, or pick one of eight colors (red, orange, yellow, green, teal, blue, purple, pink).
- Reorder: drag track headers to change their order.
- Duplicate: the duplicate button above the track headers copies every selected track. The copy is a full clone of the channel: the same color, group and bus assignment, the same processor settings, and the same plug-ins with the settings they have right now — including anything you have tweaked since the last save. An instrument track's copy gets its own instrument loaded with the same preset, so the two tracks play independently. If the original was record-armed, the arm moves to the copy, ready for the next take — the original disarms so the two can't both capture the same input. (Duplicating during a take leaves the arm where it is; the pass already in progress owns it.) If the original had Input Monitoring on, monitoring follows the copy as well, since only one track at a time monitors a given input.
- Remove: from the channel strip's options.
A track can be mono or stereo (the MO / ST toggle on the strip). The choice affects how it records and monitors, which inputs are offered, and how its clips play back: a mono track sums its audio to a single channel, so a stereo clip on a mono track is folded to mono (then placed by the pan control), while a stereo track keeps left and right separate. The fader's meter follows suit — one bar for mono, side-by-side L/R bars for stereo. Most mics are mono; synths, stereo sub-mixes, and many virtual instruments are stereo. When you import an audio file, the new track's mode is set to match the file (stereo file → stereo track, mono file → mono track). Assigning a virtual instrument switches the track to stereo by default so its primary output keeps both channels; you can switch it back to mono afterward with the MO / ST toggle.
What a track can hold as input
A track's input source is where new recordings come from:
- No Input — normally a playback-only lane (e.g. an imported file). It can also receive and record a network/generator plug-in such as SonoBus when that insert is placed before Record Point.
- Hardware Input — a physical input channel (or stereo pair) on your audio interface or built-in mic. See Recording Audio.
- Instrument — a hosted virtual instrument you play live and record as audio. See Recording Instruments.
Audio file clips sit on the track's lane independently of the input source, so a track can both play back existing clips and record new ones.
The channel strip at a glance
Open a track's channel strip by selecting the track (in the mixer, or by selecting its header in the timeline). Selecting more than one strip makes them edit together — see Ganged editing. The strip is organized into a fixed, musical signal flow from top to bottom:
INPUT → [ RECORD POINT → PREAMP / COLOR → FILTER → GATE → EQ → COMPRESSOR → DE-ESSER → INSERTS ] → PAN → FADER → OUTPUT
└──────────────────────── reorderable processing chain ────────────────────────────────┘
- Input — pick the hardware input or instrument, set mono/stereo, arm for recording, and enable input monitoring.
- Preamp / Color — analog-style gain staging and harmonic color. It leads the chain by default, but is reorderable like everything else — so you can place an insert (e.g. an amp-sim) ahead of it and still color the result with the built-in preamp.
- The processing chain — Record Point, Preamp/Color, Filter, Gate, EQ, Compressor, De-Esser, and up to six plug-in Inserts. These can be reordered to taste. Audio above Record Point is printed into new takes; processors below it remain editable.
- Pan — places the signal in the stereo field.
- Fader — the track's level, with a meter beside it. The same fader appears as a horizontal control in the timeline track header and as the tall fader on the mixer channel strip; both share one dB value and one Logic-style taper, so they always match. Hold ⇧ (Shift) while dragging for fine control, and double-click the cap to reset to 0 dB.
- Output — which bus or hardware output the track feeds, plus aux and cue sends for effects and headphone mixes. If you give a mix bus a color, every strip routed to it tints its Output button that color, so you can scan the console and see the routing at a glance. Strips feeding the master, or feeding a bus you have not colored, keep the neutral yellow.
Strip sections in the mixer
To keep strips compact, the mixer shows one section at a time. Tap the section tabs to switch a strip between:
| Tab | Shows |
|---|---|
| DYN (Dynamics) | Gate, compressor, and de-esser |
| EQ | The high/low-pass filters and the 4-band parametric equalizer |
| INS (Inserts) | Input source, preamp/color (gain, trim, drive, tilt, pad, phase), and the six plug-in insert slots |
| SND (Sends) | Aux sends and cue (headphone) sends |
In the timeline's inline inspector you get the same sections for the selected track and, alongside it, the strip of the bus or master it routes to.
Reordering the processing chain
The order of the processors is not fixed. Select the stacked-layers Processing Order button beside DYN / EQ / INS / SND, then drag a stage to its new position. Drop on the upper or lower half of a row to place it before or after that stage. The list identifies active, bypassed, empty, unavailable, and fixed stages; Reset to Default restores the strip's original chain.
For example, try EQ before the compressor versus after, or gate before EQ. The Preamp/Color stage is draggable too, so you can run a plug-in insert in front of it (a common trick: an amp-sim first, then the built-in preamp for coloration). Only the pan/fader/meter stay fixed at the end; everything ahead of them — the preamp and Record Point included — is yours to arrange. Plug-in inserts can be placed anywhere in that chain. Record Point cannot be removed: move it above everything for dry recording, or below only the processors you want committed to the new audio file. Processing Order is locked during count-in and recording so the capture path cannot change halfway through a take.
Mute, Solo, Arm, and Monitor
Each track has these core controls (the M and S buttons sit by the fader; the R and I buttons sit in the input/inserts section):
- Mute — the "M" button — silences the track. Lights blue when engaged.
- Solo — the "S" button — silences everything except soloed tracks, so you can isolate what you're working on. Soloing is smart about buses and groups. Lights yellow when engaged.
- Arm — the "R" button — enables the track for recording. Only armed tracks record when you press Record. It's disabled until the track has an input assigned. Lights red when engaged. See Recording Audio.
- Input Monitor — the "I" button — routes the live input through the track's processing so you can hear it while you set up and record. Lights green when engaged.
You can also arm, disarm, mute, and solo from a track's right-click / long-press menu. When tracks are joined in a track group, clip editing, arm, mute, and solo propagate to all members at once — see Mixing.
Freezing a track
Freezing prints a track's processed sound to a file and switches its processing off. The track keeps playing exactly as it did, but its EQ, compressor, filters, preamp and — most importantly — its plug-ins stop using any CPU, and the plug-ins are unloaded, giving their memory back too.
On an instrument track the hosted instrument is released as well. That is usually the biggest saving of all, since a sampled or modelled instrument holds far more memory than a typical effect. While the track is frozen its instrument is not loaded, so its editor cannot be opened and the on-screen or hardware keyboard no longer plays it — unfreeze first if you want to play the part again. (An instrument shared by more than one track stays loaded until the last track using it is frozen.)
Freeze the tracks you have finished, and you get that CPU and memory back for the ones you are still working on. It is the difference between a session that has run out of headroom and one you can keep recording into.
To freeze: click the snowflake button in the track header (to the right of the automation button), or on the channel strip beside M and S. It is also in a track's right-click / long-press menu as Freeze Track. A progress dialog shows the print, with a Cancel Freeze button; a long track takes a moment. Click the snowflake again to unfreeze.
The snowflake is dimmed when a freeze isn't possible right now: the track has no clips to print, or an export, another freeze, or a recording is already running. A frozen track's snowflake is normally live so it cannot be stranded. It is disabled only while recording or while the shared offline renderer is busy; stop the take or wait for that render to finish, then thaw it.
A frozen track shows its snowflake button lit in pale cyan and its lane tinted the same colour.
What you can still change while frozen
| Still live | Locked |
|---|---|
| Level fader | Preamp / Color |
| Pan | Filters, EQ |
| Mute, Solo | Gate, Compressor, De-Esser |
| Track colour, name, delete | All sends — aux, bus and cue |
| Fader, pan and mute automation | Plug-in inserts (including their editors) |
| Processing Order | |
| Input source, R (arm), I (input monitor) | |
| Mono / stereo | |
| Output, VCA and group assignment | |
| The instrument on an instrument track | |
| Send and processor automation |
Level, pan, mute and solo stay live so you can balance the printed track in the mix — and so do their automation lanes, which drive exactly those controls. Processing, routing and sends are locked to keep the frozen signal path stable. Locked controls are dimmed rather than hidden, so you can still see what the track was frozen with, and locked automation lanes can still be read even though they cannot be edited.
Clips on a frozen track cannot be edited. The track is playing the printed file, so an edit would not be heard until you unfroze and re-froze it. Unfreeze first, make the edit, then freeze again.
Unfreezing
Unfreezing puts the live chain back and re-loads the plug-ins — and, on an instrument track, the instrument — that the freeze released. That takes as long as opening them normally does, and a large amp or instrument plug-in can take several seconds, so a progress dialog shows how many have come back. The instrument is restored first, then the inserts, so the strip is rebuilt in signal order.
You don't have to sit and watch it. Continue in Background puts the progress dialog away and lets the plug-ins keep loading. The frozen print keeps playing until the entire live chain is ready, then AnalogDAW switches over in one step — you never hear a dry half-restored track. (Freezing and exporting still wait their turn until the reload finishes.) If a plug-in never comes back at all, AnalogDAW stops waiting on its own, leaves the frozen print active, and tells you which part of the chain could not be restored. Restore or reinstall that plug-in, then click the snowflake to retry; it never switches to an incomplete live chain.
Things worth knowing
- Freezing does not touch your clips. They are still there, unchanged, underneath the printed file. Unfreezing goes straight back to them.
- Record-arm and input monitoring switch off when a track freezes, because a frozen track has no live input path. On an instrument track, live MIDI stops pointing at the frozen instrument for the same reason.
- Changing the session sample rate unfreezes every track, because a printed file is tied to the rate it was rendered at. AnalogDAW parks playback, restores the released plug-ins and instruments one track at a time, then switches every track back to its live chain together. You can dismiss the progress dialog, but playback, recording and export wait for the restore to finish. If any plug-in cannot be restored, the rate change is cancelled and every frozen print stays intact at the previous rate. Re-freeze afterwards.
- The printed files live inside your project package, so a frozen session opens frozen on another machine. Opening a project with frozen tracks does not load their plug-ins or instruments at all — those sessions open faster and lighter.
- Templates never carry a freeze. A template is a console setup, not a project: it has no clips, so it has no printed audio to be frozen onto. Save a template from a session with frozen tracks and you get the full channel setup — processors, plug-ins, routing — on live, unfrozen tracks.
- One at a time. The print itself uses the same offline renderer as exporting, so a freeze and an export can never run together. Unfreezing does not render — it re-loads plug-ins — but it holds the same slot, so only one track is being frozen or unfrozen at any moment, and an export waits for either to finish.
Next: The Audio Processors →