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The Interface
Since audio recording and editing is displayed visualy, it makes sense to work with the visual objects itself.
Traverso uses the mouse pointer to point to a graphical object (doh), but in contradiction to other programs, you can't 'click' on them. Instead, we use the keyboard for the 'clicking'.
This concept is called 'soft selection'.
Graphical objects
A graphical object in an audio application can be a Song, Track, AudioClip, Curve's and so on.
As long as the mouse pointer is above the object, all actions available to that object can be applied via a keyboard action!
This means that you don't have to move the mouse cursor to that tiny button to mute a Track or AudioClip, most of the time, the mouse pointer is allready above the Track!
Now we perform the right "key command" and the Track will be muted, or if the mouse was upon an AudioClip, the Clip will be muted.
What "key commands" are, and how to use them will be explained in the section "Key Commands" :-)
But I see no Sliders too
Thats true. No buttons, and also no sliders to for example change the Gain of a Track!
One in our opinion huge advantage of the 'soft selection' concept is, that it brings analogue actions to the GUI (Graphical User Interface) without the need of explicit 'Sliders'
So, again, we don't move the mouse to a "Slider", but instead point the mouse to the graphical object, make the correct key command, we "move the mouse", and voila, the equivalent of a Slider, but much better ;-)
Context Menu's
Now, the keyboard has a lot of keys. We do not use all of them, but we try to use them efficiently and in a sensible way.
Due the fact we can makeup so many key commands of the keys on a keyboard, there needs to be a way to inform you which kind of 'key click' is needed to perform some action on a graphical object.
To avoid looking up the command reference for each and every key command available, we use "Context Menus".
Each graphical object has it's "Context Menu", which you can show by a special reserved key command.
This way, you quickly will learn the available commands for each graphical object, and it's very handy as a fast key command reference lookup as well :-)
A number of actions (all, but "hold" action, explained in the next section) will work from these menu's as well! Please note that the Context Menu's are meant to quickly learn the available commands, and are NOT a replacement for them!
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