Getting Started

The editor

The editor is the heart of Import and Organize. It is the first page of the same two-page wizard (the second is Session Settings): your tracks land here as lanes, you audition, trim, split, rename and reorder them, then continue to decide where everything lands in Pro Tools. In Settings the editor is called Visualizer.

A floating bar at the bottom shows Step 1 of 2 with Back and Next; on the last page the forward button becomes Import or Organize, next to Add to Queue. Through Import the editor is available on every tier; through Organize it requires the Organize module.

The control bar

A full-width strip above the timeline, in two clusters. One rule holds everywhere: every control stays visible and only disables itself when it does not apply.

• LCD: timecode digits in mm:ss.cc in seconds mode or bar.beat.tick in musical mode, with a SEC/BPM badge that flips the unit for the whole timeline. On the LCD's left edge sits the transport pill: Stop (disabled while nothing is playing), Back 10 seconds, Play/Pause, Forward 10 seconds and Loop (disabled until you select a range; enabling it moves the playhead to the loop start if it is outside).
• Grid, tempo and zoom: Snap to grid (disabled when the grid resolution is Off). In musical mode you also get a Tempo field (whole numbers, 1 to 999 BPM, confirmed with Return), a Detect Tempo wand that reads the tempo from the loaded audio and reports the BPM it found with a confidence level, and a Grid resolution menu from 1/1 to 1/64 (default 1/4). In seconds mode, Grid resolution offers Off, 0.1 s, 0.25 s, 0.5 s, 1 s, 2 s, 5 s, 10 s and 30 s. Zoom and Track Height sliders close the bar.

The track panel

The left panel is headed Tracks with a live count. The + button (Add Track) opens an audio file picker, and every file you add runs through the exact same pipeline as a drop on the Home screen: stereo pairs, recognition, naming, category and color, grouping. The … menu (Track list options) holds Add Track…, Remove Selected Track(s), Clear All Mutes and Clear All Solos.

Each lane header shows the track name and its category, M and S buttons, a fader (double-click resets it to 0 dB) and a Mono/Stereo indicator. Right-click a header for the lane's context menu: Rename Track…; Mute, Solo and Reset Fader to 0.0 dB; a Category submenu listing the categories configured in Settings; Move Track Up and Move Track Down; Remove Track. Dragging a header vertically reorders the lanes.

Editing on the timeline

• Click a clip to select it (this discards any range selection).
• ⌥-click a clip to move the playhead to that exact point.
• Drag the edge of a selected clip to trim it, with a live preview.
• Drag a clip's body vertically to move it to another lane.
• Drag a clip's body horizontally to make a range selection. ⌃-drag always makes a range selection.
• Drag on the ruler for a range selection; drag a selection's edge to resize it.
• Click the ruler to seek; clicking a marker flag jumps to its exact time.
• Pinch to zoom horizontally, ⌃-pinch to zoom vertically.

Playback stops at the end of the timeline, a loop returns to its start, and a click while a selection is active clears the selection instead of seeking. Markers are keyboard-only: there is no marker cluster in the control bar. M drops a marker at the playhead, ⌥→ and ⌥← jump to the next and previous marker, and ⌥⌫ deletes the nearest one.

Undo and redo

Undo and redo live in the Edit menu as Undo {Action} and Redo {Action} (⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z), naming what they will revert: Edit Timeline, Add Track, Add Tracks, Mute / Solo, Fader, Marker. ⌘Z inside a text field belongs to the field, and an edit that changes nothing produces no history entry.

Default keyboard shortcuts

These are the defaults; every editor shortcut can be remapped in Settings ▸ Shortcuts. A focused text field keeps its own keys.

Transport

• Play / Pause: Space
• Stop: ⌘.
• Go to start / go to end: Return / ⌘Return
• Nudge backward / forward (1.0 s): ← / →

Clip editing

• Delete clip: ⌫ (with no clip selected, this removes the selected tracks)
• Split at playhead: ⌘E
• Trim leading silence / trailing silence: ⌥⌘L / ⌥⇧⌘L

Markers

• Add marker: M
• Next / previous marker: ⌥→ / ⌥←
• Delete nearest marker: ⌥⌫

View and selection

• Toggle loop: ⌘L
• Zoom in / out: ⌘= / ⌘-
• Vertical zoom in / out: ⌥⌘= / ⌥⌘-
• Clear selection: ⎋
• Solo selected tracks: S
• Toggle snap to grid: ⇧⌘G

What the editor does not do

• No fades or crossfades on clips.
• No strip-silence preview on the waveform: the cutting is done by Pro Tools after the import, using your per-category parameters (see Strip silence).
• Clips cannot be moved in time with the mouse: a horizontal drag selects a range. Use trim and split instead.
• No context menu on clips; context menus live on the lane headers.
• Timecode precision is fixed at hundredths of a second.