Playback

Playback is built to stay out of your way. Space starts and pauses the song from anywhere outside a text field. Moving a clip, drawing notes, changing an instrument, dragging a fade, seeking in the ruler, toggling a loop or importing a file all happen while the music keeps going. When an edit needs the engine to rebuild its graph, the mix fades down for ten milliseconds, the clock holds, and the new version fades back in; nothing stops unless you stop it.

When to use it

Leave the song running while you arrange. Set a loop over the phrase you are working on, then try instruments, move clips and adjust gains without reaching for Play again. Pause explicitly when you want silence; the transport respects that choice over any edit that would otherwise continue.

Controls

Play and pause

The Play button and Space toggle between playing and paused. Pausing holds the position. Return to start goes to the beginning, or to the loop start when a loop begins later, and keeps playing if the song was playing. Escape, outside a drag, is an explicit stop.

Seeking

Click the ruler or an empty part of a lane to move the playhead; playback follows without pausing. Starting inside a held note picks that note up where it would have been, with its envelope roughly in place; drum hits that already happened are not replayed, and reverb or delay memory starts fresh. This is a responsive preview, not a replay of everything before the cursor.

Loop and region

Drag in the ruler to select a region and drag its edges to resize; Alt bypasses snap. The Loop button repeats the selected region, or the whole song when nothing is selected. Resizing a region while it loops keeps your place if the playhead is still inside it; otherwise playback moves to the new loop start. Clearing the region returns to a whole-song loop. Right-click the ruler to show the timeline in bars and beats or in seconds.

Pause wins

A paused song stays paused through seeks, undo and every edit. If you pause while an edit is being prepared, the edit still lands but the transport does not restart. Recording always runs forward: seek, loop and region changes wait until the take is stopped.

Starting on slower machines

Before the first audible block, the engine runs a short silent warm-up so the opening bars play on compiled code. On a fast computer that is a few milliseconds; on an older tablet it can be a few hundred, and it is why the start no longer stutters there.

Tips

• When a rebuild happens, effect tails reset. If you want to hear a reverb tail ring past an edit, make the edit just before the phrase starts rather than on its last note.
• Exporting, rendering a clip, freezing a track and stopping a recording still stop the transport; everything else keeps the song going.
• The Performance meter shows whether a dense section is close to the engine’s budget before you hear it drop out.