User:Billw58/Channels Tracks and Clips

Bill 02Dec11: Just a mock-up of what a page dedicated to this topic might look like. I've just grabbed existing images for now but these could be replaced with more compact and illustrative images if need be. The page may seem a bit "threadbare", but I'm not convinced that the terms "channel", "track" and "clip" can get by with just glossary entries.
 * Peter 2Dec11: A fair point Bill about mere glossary enries. This could be a useful page - personally I like short, puchy and to-the-point pages (aka "threaddbare").  This page has me thinking that in order to avoid bloating the entries in "Understanding Audacity" on the front page of the manual maybe which just need a link to a new uber-page that provides brief text and links to: this page, Audio Tracks, Audacity Tracks and Clips and your new "Splitting & Joining" page.  Any thoughts?
 * Bill 02Dec11: an "uber-page" :) Like this? User:Billw58/Working_with_Audio_Tracks
 * Peter 2Dec11: works for me as a title.
 * Bill 02Dec11: yes, but what about the content, and the items it would replace on the front page?

Channels, Tracks and Clips
The terms channel, track and clip can be a little confusing, especially because some programs may use them to mean slightly different things. Within Audacity, the meaning is as follows:

Channel
A channel is for audio input or output. Audacity can record two channels of input (stereo), and more if you have a special sound card or audio device that supports more than two simultaneous channels. Audacity only supports two channels of output, no matter what kind of audio hardware you have.

You can see the two input and output channels on Audacity's Meter Toolbar
 * [[Image:MeterInActionGood.png|The Meter Toolbar]]

In the image above, you can see the left (L) and right (R) channels labelled on the output (green) and input (red) meters.

Track
A track is like one instrument in your symphony, or one voice in your podcast. You can add more tracks, and all of them will be mixed together to create your final output, but during editing you can manipulate each track independently. If you have an interview recorded with two microphones, each one can go in a separate track. If you have background music, that could go in a third track. You can move the whole track along the Timeline so that it plays at a different point in time in the mix, but until it is split you cannot move individual parts of it around.
 * [[Image:Tutorial3LinedUp.png|image of project with several tracks]]

The image above show a project with three tracks: from top to bottom - a stereo track, mono track and a label track.

See Audio Tracks and Label Tracks for more information.

Clip
A clip inside a track is a separate section of that track which has been split so that it can be manipulated somewhat independently of the other clips in the track. For example, you can split an interview into separate clips for each sentence then move them around individually although they are all from the same track. Or you could move a clip to another track that is panned further right, or split it to a new, empty track. The new track only contains that single clip, so again you can only move that whole track unless you split it into multiple clips.


 * [[Image:TimeShiftStereo03.png|image of two tracks showing multiple clips in each track]]

The image above shows two audio tracks each of which contains several clips.