User manual

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Working with tracks and lanes
Setting up tracks
Proceed as follows:
1. Move the mouse pointer over the lower border of the (unselected) track you want
to resize.
The mouse pointer turns into a divider symbol.
2. Hold down [Alt]/[Option] and drag the lower border of the track until it reaches the
desired height.
Now, when you select this track, (and “Enlarge Selected Track” is activated), it will
be enlarged. It will revert to the changed size, when you select a different track.
Defining the track time base
In the Inspector or track list you can set the time base individually for each track, by
clicking on the “Toggle Time base” button. Tracks can be either musical (tempo) or
linear (time) based or follow the Transport Main display:
• Musical
On a track using musical time base, the positions of events are represented as
meter values (bars, beats, 1/16th notes and ticks, with 120 ticks per 1/16th note).
If you change the playback tempo, the events will play back at an earlier or later
time. Musical time base is indicated by a note symbol.
• Time Linear
On a track using linear time base, the events will be positioned on specific time
positions – changing the playback tempo will not affect the time position of events.
Linear time base is indicated by a clock symbol.
• Follow Transport Main Display
This uses the primary time format setting on the Transport panel. When this is set
to “Bars+Beats”, tracks with musical time base will be added. When this is set to
any of the other options (Seconds, Timecode, Samples, etc.), all new tracks will
use linear time base.
Which time base suits better depends on the type of project and recording situation.
Ö In the Preferences dialog (Editing page), you can find the “Default Track Time Type”
option (Cubase only). This allows you to specify the default track time type for new
tracks (audio, group/FX, MIDI, and marker tracks).
For more information about tempo changes, see the chapter “Editing tempo and
signature” on page 610.
!
Internally, events on musical time based tracks use the same high precision for
positioning (64 bit floating point values) as linear time based events. However,
switching between linear and musical time base results in a very small loss of
precision (introduced by the mathematical operations used for scaling values in the
two different formats). Therefore you should avoid switching repeatedly between the
two modes.