Tracks

A DAW-style sample arranger packed into a single module. Drop audio onto a six-lane timeline, slide clips into place, and play the arrangement back as a stereo master or six independent track outs. Loops, beds, vocal chops, and one-shots laid out in time — a tape-style song layer living in your patch.

How it works

The playhead reads straight through your clips one engine sample per sample, so audio always plays at its native pitch and speed — there's no time-stretching or warping. Overlapping clips on the same lane sum together, and every clip edge is auto-faded to kill boundary clicks. Tempo never changes how a clip sounds. It sets the beat grid and the clock outputs, and in Musical Mode it moves the clips so they stay on the grid.

Controls

  • Clock: Own / Song — who drives playback. Own is the module's own transport strip and Play input. Song hands the transport to the automation timeline. Press play in the Automation dock or on a Song Clock and the arrangement plays. Stop, rewind, drag the playhead, or loop the dock, and the arrangement follows. Clips still play at their native pitch and speed. In Song mode Play and Stop are off, ⏮ rewinds the whole song, and with Loop on the arrangement repeats inside the song. In Timecode time mode, clips keep their clock positions, so changing the song's BPM shifts where they fall against the beat grid; in Musical Mode they ride the grid instead.
  • Transport (⏮ ⏹ ▶) — the control bar's transport strip, the same one the Piano Roll wears. Play and Stop run and halt the playhead; when stopped, every output falls silent (no hold). They dim in Song mode, where the timeline owns the transport. ⏮ always works: it returns the playhead to the start, or rewinds the whole song in Song mode.
  • BPM — the module's own tempo, in the control bar. In Song mode the Automation dock owns the tempo, so the box dims and shows the dock's — the tempo actually running the grid and the clock outputs. Your own setting is untouched underneath; switch back to Own and it returns (the settings menu shows it either way).
  • Snap — snap clip edges, and the edit cursor, to the beat grid and to neighbouring clips. It's in the control bar and in the settings menu. Snapping and Show Grid are separate: you can snap to a grid you aren't drawing.
  • Edit cursor — the pale vertical line down the timeline. Click or drag in the ruler along the top to place it. It marks where a split happens and where pasted clips land, and with Snap on it lands on the grid, so you can put it exactly on a bar.
  • Adding samples — right-click the timeline where you want the clip and choose Add Sample…; it lands on the track you clicked.
  • Timeline — the heart of the module: arrange clips across six lanes. Drag them in time or between lanes, trim their edges, and reverse, duplicate, split, or delete them. Click a clip to select it, shift-click to add another, or drag a box across empty space to catch several at once.
  • Splitting a clip — select a clip and press S, or right-click it and choose Split. A clip is a window onto a sample rather than a copy of it, so a split only changes where each half starts and ends: no audio is duplicated and none is thrown away. Widen the halves back out and you have the original again. The cut lands on the edit cursor when the cursor crosses the clip, and on the spot you right-clicked when it doesn't; the menu says which. Afterwards the right-hand half is selected, ready to move or delete.
  • Keyboard — with the pointer over the panel: Delete removes the selected clips, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V copy and paste them, Ctrl+A selects every clip, S splits, and Escape clears the selection. Pasted clips land at the edit cursor, on the tracks they came from. These keys act on clips only while the pointer is over the panel. Move it away first to delete or copy the module itself.
  • Mute — silence any track without disturbing its clips.
  • Settings (⚙) — the gear at the top of the panel opens the module's settings: Time Mode, Tempo, Loop Playback, Show Grid, and Snap to Grid. Right-clicking the panel outside the timeline — the title bar, say, or the transport row — opens the same menu. These apply to the whole module; snapping, for example, can't be set per track. Right-clicking inside the timeline stays about the spot you clicked: add a sample there, mute that track, or act on the clip under the pointer.
  • Loop, grid & snap — loop the arrangement when it reaches the end, show the beat grid, and snap to the grid or to neighbouring clips. Drawing the grid and snapping to it are independent settings. In Song mode the grid and snapping follow the song's BPM automatically.
  • Time Mode — how the whole arrangement holds its positions, set from the settings menu under Time Mode. In Musical Mode (the default) every clip keeps its bar-and-beat position, so changing the tempo moves the clips to keep them on the beat grid. In Timecode every clip keeps its clock position instead; use it when sounds are tied to moments, such as hits locked to picture. Switching modes never moves a clip: it only changes how the arrangement responds to future tempo changes. The menu stays open when you switch, and the checkmark moves to your choice. The ruler follows the mode too: Musical Mode labels it in bars and beats (1, 5, 3.2 — bar ticks in amber, matching the grid), while Timecode labels it in seconds. In Musical Mode a tempo change also keeps the view on the bars you were looking at, instead of drifting to a different part of the song. Zoom far enough in and the bars ruler hands back to seconds — at sample level, clock time is the honest unit.
  • Tempo — the settings menu carries the tempo too. With Clock: Own it's an editable field (type a BPM, press Enter — the menu stays open). With Clock: Song the tempo belongs to the Automation dock, so the row just shows the song's BPM.

Inputs & outputs

  • Play — a gate that runs the transport while held; it works alongside the panel's ▶ button. Inert in Song mode, where the timeline owns the transport.
  • Reset — a trigger that returns the playhead to the start. In Song mode it rewinds the whole song.
  • L / R — the stereo master mix of all six tracks, muted lanes dropped.
  • 1L/1R – 6L/6R — each track's isolated stereo output, for sending individual lanes to their own effects or an external mixer.
  • POS — a 0–10 V phasor tracking the playhead across the whole arrangement.
  • EOS — fires a trigger when the playhead reaches the end.
  • 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 — beat-clock pulses at eighth-, sixteenth-, and thirty-second-note divisions; patch them to drive sequencers and envelopes in step with the grid. In Song mode these follow the song's BPM, so they line up with the Automation dock's grid.

Tips

  • Patch POS into a scanner, wavetable, or another sample player to lock a second voice to the arrangement's position.
  • Send a single track's stereo out to its own effect chain, then return it to the master for parallel processing or sidechaining.
  • Reverse a clip and overlap it with its forward copy for swelling, palindrome textures.