this is the second video in the tracktion waveform basics series and in this tracktion
waveform tutorial i'm going to show you how to create projects how to organize your projects and
basically just how to work with projects and where you save your project can affect your recordings
i'll get to that later on in the video i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where it's my goal to
help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creativity and i do this by providing easy to
follow audio tech tips tutorials and reviews now i've included a link down in the description to
even more tracktion waveform tutorials so when you're done this one you can move on to some
more but right now let's jump in all right first let's look at some basic project creation so i'm
on the project tab at the top here and if i wanted to start a new project i would just go down here
click on new project give it a name now i could click here and choose where i want to save it
to i could save it to an external hard drive if i wanted or anywhere on my main hard drive
and i could also choose a different template if i wanted but for this i'm just going to
choose the default one and i'm going to click create now typically the first things i do once
i'm in a project is i close this sidebar down just by clicking that x but you could also go
up to the eyeball up here and click on the various parts that you want to close down
i usually have my screen like this
and you can see we have our project open here but you can have more than one project open
at the same time and where you might find this helpful is if you want to copy something from
another project over into the one you're working on and i do this quite a bit i will have another
project open here and i'll copy some audio over into this one so i'll just open another project
here and you can see what i'm talking about so if i wanted to copy this guitar part right here
i could just right click on it copy then go over to this project and then i can press
ctrl v on my computer keyboard and paste it in and i also like to close down my projects before
i close down waveform because if you leave it open the next time you open waveform is going to
open that project that you had left open so if you have more than one open it's going to try to open
all of those and it can slow down the process of opening up waveforms so i always close them down
just by clicking the x so you can see our new project is listed in the active projects folder
up here if i wanted i could put this into another section or folder so i could stay organized and
you can also minimize these folders so you don't see everything that's in there
and it keeps everything nice and tidy over on your projects folder page here so you can also have
folders within folders you can see here i have library projects then i have this folder that's
inside that folder so if you're working with multiple bands or projects and you want them
all in one place you could have band name as the main folder and then the album name as another
folder within it and then you can have all your projects in there and this doesn't affect where
they're located on your hard drive this is just for organization in here so let's look at creating
a new folder so all we need to do is go down to the bottom here create folder give it a name click
ok and then you can see i have my waveform basics folder so i actually want to bring that down to
the bottom here and i want to put my waveform basics 2 project into that folder so i just click
and drag it onto there and now you can see i have waveform basics and the project waveform basics
2 in there when you click on a project the edits will go here so you can have multiple edits within
a project you would just save edit as when you're in the project i'll show you
so you just go down here save edit as and we'll just call this edit2 save and now when we go to
our projects i have edit two and the way i use that is sometimes i'll actually have a
second edit where i just record my vocals into it or an acoustic guitar or something into
a second edit and then i'll copy it over into my main edit the reason for that is my main
edit could have a lot of effects and things in it so the latency might be a little higher
i'll create a second one and i'll take away a lot of stuff and just record and i'll call that like
whatever the name is and then vocals another way you can do this is to a and b different settings
so if you want to test out different effects on your master bus to see what sounds better you
can have one saved as edit one and then the other one edit two and you can kind of go back and forth
to hear how they sound now if you want to change the actual folder location on your hard drive or
maybe move it to an external drive that's pretty easy to do too i accidentally saved this project
to my current ep folder so now i want to change it so i'm just going to right click on it over here
and then i'm going to click on move the folder containing this project and you can see i can
choose wherever i want in here and i have it in my ep 2 folder right now i want to put it
in my traction projects folder so i'm just going to click on that then click ok and you
can see i could create a new folder if i wanted to but i'm fine with it there so i'll click ok
you notice nothing in here has changed it still looks the same in here but if i go to my hard
drive tracktion projects we can see waveform basics 2 is in there and if i had anything
recorded or anything it's moving the entire folder there so you don't have to worry about
losing any information or your song structure or anything like that it just moves everything there
and the next time you open it it will open up fine and now let's look at established projects
here's one i'm working on right now and you notice when i click on the project i have my two edits
here as you can see one was for acoustic recording and then over here these are all my recordings
and you can see here is the recorded audio and that's everything i recorded in
here's imported audio or midi and then here's some backups that were created automatically for me
and then i also have an exported section here so i rendered it down and that's where it shows
up in there so you have access to all of your audio files before you even open up your project
now another thing that you're going to notice is there's this share button right there
and if you want to open this project on another computer or share it with someone
else completely intact then you can click on the share button then click share an archive
of this edit you can see if i click right here i can export as a single tracktion archive file
or i can export as files in a directory so if i did the files in a directory it's just basically
putting everything into a folder and i could choose to zip that up and send it to somebody
or move it to wherever i need to move it if i do this tracktion archive file that's sort of like
traction's own zip file and you can open that as a project within tracktion so if you sent it to
somebody else and they have traction waveform on their computer they'll be able to open it on there
now you got to remember if they don't have the same plugins that you used they won't be able
to use those plug-ins but if you're just using internal plugins and things like that you'll have
no problems and you can also change where you want to save this to maybe your desktop or somewhere
else and i would just leave the rest of this as is and then you would create archive it's that easy
at the beginning of this video i said where you save your projects can affect your recordings and
what i mean by this is ideally you should be saving to an external hard drive something like
one of these and that's because you don't want to be saving to your main operating system hard drive
so you can also save to an internal hard drive that's not your main operating system hard drive
and especially if you have a slower hard drive on your computer laptops are famous for having
slower hard drives your main hard drive is going to be busy with your operating system
and other background tasks that might be going on so you're not getting the full power of that drive
now if you use an external hard drive it's not doing anything else so you're going to be getting
the full power of that external hard drive i've had issues in the past when recording to the
system drive where i get stutters or even full dropouts and sometimes those stutters are very
subtle so you don't notice that it happens it's almost like a frame drop when you're recording
video you don't really notice it but it's there and what happens is it throws the timing off as
your song goes on so the further your song goes on your timing goes out even more and it can drive
you crazy wondering why that's happening at least it drove me crazy until i realized i'm recording
to my system hard drive and i'm dropping some audio information now this might not happen to
you every time but if you have an external hard drive set it up as your main recording hard drive
then you don't ever have to worry about it now if you want to check out even more traction waveform
tutorials click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you like this
video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for even more tracktion waveform
tutorials thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon