launch your projects access templates and your audio settings easier a new audio engine an
easier workflow in the timeline plus a new way to use your computer keyboard as a midi keyboard
on the fly in this video i'm looking at some of the new updates in tracktion waveform 11.5 free
and pro because they're both the same core program so this applies to both i'm zane welcome to audio
tech tv where it's my goal to help you unleash your creative beast by providing easy to follow
audio tech tips tutorials and reviews and if you want to check out more info on waveform or maybe
you want to download it for yourself i've included a link down in the description so you can head
down there and get that but right now let's jump in all right so tracktion waveform 11.5 includes a
bunch of small updates bug fixes and behind the scenes types of things plus there's some things
that you're going to notice right away and that's what i'm going to look at when you first open
waveform 11.5 you're likely going to be asked if you want to continue to use the new audio engine
or if you want to go with the old one now the new engine has been optimized for lower latency and
better performance so definitely go with this one if for some reason your computer doesn't like it
you can always go back and change it to the old one later but give the new one a try now the next
thing that you're going to notice is when you open tracktion waveform you're going to be greeted with
the new welcome screen which makes it a little bit easier for you to launch your projects from
the recent edits over here you can access your project templates right in the center here and
you have your news feed over here plus training videos and you can easily open up a new project by
clicking there browse all of your projects which brings you to the old project screen which is
what we used to see when we first opened tracktion waveform so don't worry you still have access to
that projects page if you like that personally i do like the projects page but i think this
welcome screen is going to be nice for people just getting into the daw for the first time it really
is going to ease them into the workflow here and if you don't ever want to see this welcome screen
again when you open it up you can easily go into settings then go to general and then you can go
to this startup area here and if you click right there you have some options for how you want to
open waveform so i'm going to select projects and now the next time that i open waveform it's going
to go directly to this page here all right and another change that's pretty cool is you can now
have favorite plugins you can see that there's a favorite plugin list over here and this is in the
settings plugins tab and to put your plugins over there whatever your favorite might be
see i like this one here i can just drag it over and now when you go to add a plug-in
by right clicking over here you can see this has changed too it says add plugin to the left
but when you click on that you'll also notice that the way the plugins are organized is different but
i'll get to that in just a bit but you'll notice that you have favorites at the top here and all
of your favorites are going to be in there so you can easily access those plugins that you use
often and if you use this to add plugins you just right click on this gray plus sign here
and it brings up this window all of your favorite plugins are going to be at the top so you can see
my three plugins that i use right there they're at the top and if i added more it's just going
to continue going here so you can easily just drag and drop that into your project
alright so now back to the sorting of plugins you're going to notice when you right click
add plugins it's now sorting them by manufacturer by default so you might like this maybe you don't
if you don't you can go to settings and then down here it says plug-in sorting
click on that and you can go back to disk location or you can choose category if you want
i like the disk location i kind of had folders set up for mine so now when we right click it's back
to the old way that it used to be set up where it was folder location and you can see you still
have your favorites at the top here which is nice so you do have options for how your plugins are
sorted and you can choose whichever one works best for your workflow now another cool feature that
can speed up things with your workflow is you can now right click on any open area of a track here
where there's nothing there's no clip or anything so if i right click here i can now insert a midi
clip or any other clip in there i can open it up and start editing midi if i want instead
of just dragging that down into here and then selecting just makes things a little bit quicker
alright another new timeline feature is that you can click and drag over sections like this
and now i can right click on it and i can choose heal and you can see now it's made it into one
clip so that's kind of a neat new feature right there but also you can highlight this section
and then right click now i can set loop to marked region so i can easily set my loop markers right
here which is great if you want to do some loop playback right there or maybe you want to do some
punch recording in that section it just makes things a little bit easier to set your loop
regions like you notice there when i right click you can see there's cut copy crop ripple delete
there's a lot of new right-click menus you can right-click up here and see new menus up in there
so there's some right-click menus or context menus if you want to call them that and they're all over
the place now in tracktion and here's another new feature that's pretty cool it's the new virtual
midi keyboard so there's a couple of ways you can access this if you have the screen like this which
a lot of people like to work with you just click on this little icon right here and it's going to
bring this midi typing window up then you just press caps lock on your computer keyboard and
you can now use your computer keyboard as a midi keyboard and you can change the octave by using
the z and x button so z lowers the octave and x increases the octave and if you want to change
any of the key configurations you can click on this little gear icon and then you can change
the keys up in here and the other way to access that if you have this open you can just go to
view and then you would go to show midi typing and that brings up the same window it's a lot nicer
than the virtual keyboard that we used to use so that's a very welcome added new feature so those
were just some of the bigger updates that you're going to notice when you're using waveform but
like i said there's a lot of behind the scenes stuff like bug fixes and things that made the
program a lot more stable and it's made it a lot more optimized for your computer and i'll be doing
some videos going deeper on individual things in the future and if you want to check out some more
tracktion waveform videos click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you
liked this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon