TRACKTION WAVEFORM 10
Another year, another update to this now well established and stillinnovative DAW, but what fruits have the last 12 months borne?
As happens every year, the latest version of the DAW formerly known as Tracktion is upon us. We’re going to focus entirely on the new features for this review, so if you need an overview of the software in general, dig out our review of Waveform 9 (8/10, 257), or head to the Tracktion Software website.
The Doctor is in
For us, the biggest new addition to Waveform’s feature list for v10 might well be the Groove Doctor. This is a pop-out ‘wizard’-style dialogue for groove-quantising audio and MIDI clips, and extracting their timing information for imposition on other clips, or as a tempo map. Set a range for analysis in terms of time and tracks/ clips/groups (the last of which we’ll come back to shortly), then hit the Analyse button to place transient markers (which can be freely edited, of course) in the selected clip(s). What you then do with those markers depends on which of the three operational modes is then selected in the Analyse ‘step’. ‘Quantise/groove’ slices the clip at the markers for quantising to the grid at various beat divisions, or to a groove map (preset or user-created), iteratively at up to 100%, with adjustable crossfades and a Consolidate option for finally rendering the slices back to a single clip. ‘Extract tempo map’ creates a tempo map for the project based on the timing of the capture, snapped to a one-bar grid – ideal for reclocking the click to a loosely played drum track, for example. And ‘Extract groove’ converts the timing of the transients to a groove map for saving out and imposing on other audio or MIDI clips in ‘Quantise/groove’ mode.
The Groove Doctor brings a much-needed set of groove mapping functions to Waveform, and the ability to analyse and slice multiple tracks together is ideal for tightening up multitrack drums and other layered ensembles. The interface can get a bit confusing, though, with its often-unnecessary step-by-step paradigm, and we don’t get why MIDI groove extraction is housed in the new Actions Panel (see below) rather than the Groove Doctor interface.
The aforementioned edit groups feature is another biggie. Any number of tracks can be assigned to a group, of which you can have as many as you like in a project. Groups are managed in the new Groups panel, where tracks are added/removed, and linking of Colour, Volume, Record, Pan, Mute, Solo, Sends, Track Height and Visibility are toggled on and off: adjust a linked parameter for one track and all others in the group follow. Activating the Edit option links clip positions and boundaries across grouped tracks for combined moving/ resizing, the latter, inevitably, a little unpredictable with overlapping clips. That aside, for control of main parameters, groups are fab.
Actions speak louder
Waveform 10’s Actions Panel moves the old Properties panel over to the left hand bar (revealed and hidden using the nifty new
graphical View Manager), enabling a new ‘compact’ mode for the Control bar and – more importantly – opening the Waveform UI up to some fairly serious customisation. It’s actually a series of contextual (but also navigable manually via the buttons at the top) control panels, each one containing the properties and a default set of ‘actions’ for the currently selected element – Track, Input, Clip and Plugin, or Edit for global actions. The listed actions in each Actions Panel can be added to from an extensive menu of macros and shortcuts that takes in pretty much every function and operation the DAW has to offer, as well as scripted User Macros, should you want to define your own. Three view modes offer filtering of favourited and ‘hidden’ actions, and a favourite actions popup can even be assigned to a key command for instant mouse pointer access. It all adds up to a wonderfully open-ended system for personalising the DAW to your own needs.
Individual and multiple tracks can now be popped out into self-contained Track Editor windows for simultaneous viewing and editing. Each Track Editor is independently set to follow project playback or not, and adding tracks to the window is easy – just select them from a menu.
There are quite a few lesser improvements, too, including a marquee tool for range selection, multiple-note/clip MIDI previewing, streamlined crossfade adjustment, automatic crash recovery, project consolidation, new Multi Sampler features and more.
On top ’Form
With its decidedly unorthodox interface and unique methodology, Waveform/Tracktion has always been a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, and version 10 doesn’t do much to change that – not that it should, of course. What it does do, however, is integrate a good number of very solid new features that up its workflow game considerably, most notably the Groove Doctor, the Action Panel and the Track Editor. On the downside, Waveform is arguably the least intuitive of all DAWs, so documentation is a must, and with the manual not having been updated for v10 at the time of writing, we were left scratching our heads at times – there are a few videos, but they don’t really make up for the lack of a proper PDF guide. Hopefully that will have been addressed by the time you read this, though, and ultimately, Waveform 10 stands as an impressive upgrade to Tracktion’s increasingly powerful and flexible DAW.
“A wonderfully openended system for personalising the DAW to your own needs”