Open the editor
The sheet locks input to the Timeline behind it. Press Done,
Esc, or click outside the sheet to close it. Return does not close the editor — it drops a marker at the playhead.
The window can be resized from its minimum (1280 × 540) upward to any size your display allows.
Layout
The waveform fills the body of the sheet. A single bar at the bottom holds the controls for the currently selected mode. Both the waveform and the controls are tinted with the color of the track that owns the sample. A segment picker centered in the header switches between three modes:
Press
⌘1, ⌘2, or ⌘3 to switch to Slices, Tempo, or Stems from the keyboard.
Waveform interactions
The waveform reacts to the same gestures in Slices and Tempo modes — only the click target differs. Stems mode replaces the waveform with a lane stack and has none of them. Zoom reaches as deep as the Timeline’s, down to individual samples.
The right hand never leaves the arrow cluster: step from marker to marker with the bare arrows, hold
⌘ to shove the selected marker, add ⌥ for sample-accurate alignment.
Where the camera puts the selected slice
Arrow navigation and keyboard zoom always frame the selected slice the same way, so the marker under review never has to be re-found after a keypress:- While the slice fits on screen it is centered.
- Once it is wider than the viewport — i.e. zoomed in past the point where the whole slice fits — its start marker is pinned one third in from the left edge, leaving room to judge the attack in context.
⌥← / ⌥→ walks a slice from the first state into the second, so the transient stays in view the whole way down to sample level.
Letter keys play the slices of the sample for audition (same layout as Musical Typing for audio slices).
Slices mode
Transients
A picker selects how transient markers are produced:Editing markers (Slices mode)
The selected slice is the one whose start marker the
⌘-arrow nudge moves. Selection is set with the bare ← / → arrows, by clicking a marker, or by playing a slice with its letter key.
Looping the slice you are editing
Space loops the selection rather than playing once through:
- One slice selected → that slice loops.
⇧←/⇧→extended the selection → the whole range loops as one region.- Nothing selected (
↑/↓clears it) → the whole sample loops.
→ and you immediately hear it, so a transient can be judged and corrected with ⌘← / ⌘→ without stopping playback. Moving or deleting a marker moves the loop onto the corrected position too, and holding an arrow walks the loop continuously.
Every seam the loop cuts — the turn-around, a jump to another slice, and stopping — is de-clicked with the same shape the timeline and the keyboard audition use: the outgoing pass rings out over roughly 8 ms of the audio that actually follows the slice, while the incoming pass ramps in over 2 ms. The ramp is deliberately much shorter than the ring-out, so attacks stay sharp enough to judge.
Sample operations (Slices mode)
Two chips in the top-right corner of the waveform hold non-destructive operations on the source sample, in Slices mode only. Both write back into the sample’s parameters — the original audio file is not modified, and pressing the same button again removes the effect.Shape the slices
The right of the bar holds the per-slice amplitude envelope. Option-click a slider to reset it, double-click to type a value.
These mirror the same controls in the Inspector.
Tempo mode
Tempo mode shows a beat grid overlaid on the waveform. The grid is derived from the source’s effective BPM and uses the bar/beat lines to give the user a visual reference for aligning the audio.Set the source BPM
The toolbar holds one control: Original BPM, the sample’s own tempo — detected at import, or the project tempo when detection isn’t possible. Drag the field to scrub it and the beat grid follows live, click to type a value, right-click to reset an edited value back to the detected one. Warping — Character, Stretch, Target BPM, Pitch, Formant — lives in the track Inspector, not here: “what tempo is this sample” and “fit this clip to the project” are different jobs. See Time Stretching.Aligning the beat grid
When the first downbeat of the audio doesn’t sit at the start of the file, the grid can be moved without changing the BPM:
The current offset is shown in seconds in the chip. The offset is persisted on the source and re-applied the next time the editor is opened — and stored in the Sample Library against the audio itself, so the next project that loads the same file starts from your correction.
Moving the grid says how far the clips are off; it does not move them. Align Clips finishes the job for every clip using this sample, across all tracks — it counts them in its label (Align 3 Clips) and is disabled when there is nothing to correct. It slides the audio inside each clip rather than moving the clip, so clip positions, lengths, and neighbours stay exactly as they are.
Stems mode
Stems mode replaces the single waveform with a stack of stem lanes — one row per stem (Vocals, Drums, Bass, Other for Source Stems; Kick, Snare, Cymbals, Toms for Drum Elements). Each lane carries a solo button and a volume slider — drag it to zero to mute, double-click to reset — so you can rebalance the parts inside one sample without splitting the clip across multiple tracks. Three states the user can land in:
The Algorithm picker in the middle of the bar selects the model (Source Stems / Drum Elements), and is disabled while a bake runs. A source stores one bundle at a time, so switching to a kind that hasn’t been baked drops back to Generate Stems. While a bake runs, the body of the editor swaps to a progress view; once the bundle lands on the source, the lanes appear automatically.
This is an in-place alternative to splitting a clip into separate stem tracks — both flows use the same models, but stems mode keeps everything on one track and one sample. Use stems mode when you want to mix the layers as a single instrument; use the track-split flow when you want to arrange them independently.