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7. Shaping performance

The action bar

Select something in an Editor pane, and a small bar of buttons appears near it with what you can do with it, so you don’t have to know which menu holds a command. More… at its end opens the whole menu for what’s selected, the one a right-click opens.

The action bar: what’s selected, as buttons

Available on every platform.

What it offers

  • A take you recorded (an audio clip) or a recording lane: Find the Beats, Write Tab from Audio, Find the Chords and Separate into Stems, outlined in the accent colour, then Takes (a clip recorded more than once) and Delete (a lane: Remove). See Listening tools.
  • A clip of notes: Rename, Duplicate, Make Unique (a linked copy), Repeat (it plays once more), Takes and Delete.
  • Notes: Select All first (the track’s notes; tap it again, now All in Song, for every note of the song), then Velocity, Length and Articulation as menus (while the note inspector or an Inspector pane isn’t showing them already), Transpose, Quantize (onto the grid), Copy and Delete.
  • A marker or a chord symbol: Rename and Delete.

It only shows what you can do now, on this device: the listening tools that run a model aren’t on the web, and a tool whose model isn’t installed yet gets it when you tap it. When the pane is too narrow for every button, the last ones go first; More… always has them.

Where it shows

With a mouse or a trackpad, the menu bar and the context menu already have every command, so the bar stays away. When you work a pane by touch (a touchscreen PC, the web on a tablet), it waits to be asked for, as the system’s edit menu does: selecting something shows no bar; tap the selection again, or touch and hold it, and the bar appears. The next tap elsewhere, a scroll or an edit puts it away, and so does the mouse when it returns.

A take you just recorded

Tap a take’s waveform, or its header, to select it. Where the bar shows, the listening tools are its first buttons. A right-click anywhere on the take opens its menu with the same tools, and the Inspector’s Recording section has them as buttons.