Editing Part 1: The Concepts

Now that you got the basics down, let’s introduce you to all of what Tenacity has to offer. To do that, we need to introduce some of the fundamentals concepts that make up the core featurs of Tenacity.

Clips

One of the fundamentals in Tenacity is a clip. A clip is a region of data, whether that’s audio data, MIDI data, or label data, that spans a certain range in the timeline.

Track

A track is a collection of clips. You can add, move, or delete clips in a track.

There are four different types of tracks in Tenacity:

• Audio tracks

• MIDI tracks

• Label tracks

• Time tracks

Time tracks are a bit special. See the appropriate section below.

Each track, spare time tracks, contains a clip type. For audio tracks, this is an audio clip. For MIDI tracks, this is a MIDI clip. Label tracks do have a “label clip”, but they are called “labels” for simplicity. Time tracks, however, are a bit different. See the section about time tracks for more details.

Fun fact: In Tenacity’s source code, you’ll see an audio track referred to as a WaveTrack, a MIDI track as a NoteTrack, a label track as a LabelTrack, and a time track as a TimeTrack.

Audio Tracks and MIDI Tracks

Audio and MIDI tracks can be muted, soloed, and panned, as well as have their gain adjusted (for MIDI tracks, this is known as “velocity”). Label tracks, on the other hand, do not have any controls.

Admittedly, Tenacity does not include good support for MIDI (yet!). You can only import MIDI, manage a single MIDI clip per track at a time, and play back MIDI (which requires some setup). In future versions, we are looking at bringing MIDI editing to par with audio editing, and later adding a proper MIDI editor so you can edit audio alongside MIDI and vice versa.

Label Tracks

In Audacity, label tracks served the purposes of allowing portions of the timeline to be labeled. In Tenacity this purpose has expanded to modifying chapters, cue points, or similar marks in select audio formats. For example, if a PCM-encoded or FLAC-encoded Matroska (MKA) file containing chapters is imported in Tenacity, you have the option to import them as label tracks. Similarly, you have the option of exporting any label tracks as chapters when exporting to a Matroska file.

Time Tracks

Time tracks are the “special” track because unlike the others, you can only have one time track per project. Time tracks contain time points, which only consist of one time point in the timeline, instead of clips. The purpose of a time track is different than the other tracks, and that is to manipulate the project’s speed.

Timeline

Perhaps the basics of any audio editor or DAW is the timeline. The timeline contains all your project’s clips, labels, or time points. (For more information on what those are, see below).

The Track Area

The track area is the area that contains all your tracks in the project. You can add new tracks by right clicking any empty space in the track area or rearrange tracks in the project timeline by dragging a track above or below another.

Selections

When a region of the timeline is selected, whether across a single track or multiple track, that selected region is known as a selection. You can only have one selection at a time.

In case you want to select all audio when nothing is selectedfor an operation that requires a selection, you can enable a preference option.