Session view
Available since 0.3.0
A grid of clip slots: launch clips and whole scenes in time, loop them, and drop WAV, AIFF or FLAC files straight from the Finder.
The session view is the grid below the transport bar: the 16 tracks are the columns, the 16 scenes are the rows, so the grid holds 256 slots. Every slot holds at most one audio clip and reports one of four states - empty, stopped, playing or waiting for its start - and the scene column on the left starts a whole row at once.
Clicking a slot, or pressing Enter on the focused one, arms its clip: the engine starts it at the next quantisation boundary. Off, 1/16, 1/4, 1 bar, 2 bars, 4 bars and 8 bars are available, and a fresh session reports Off. At most one clip per track plays; launching a different clip of the same track stops the clip running there at the very same boundary.
Clips arrive by drag and drop: drop a WAV, AIFF or FLAC file out of a Finder window onto a slot and the engine decodes it, resamples it to the sample rate of the engine and reports the file name and the length. Every clip carries its own Loop switch, and a clip starts and ends with a 5 ms fade.
The same grid runs on the iPad remote, which mirrors the session live and launches clips, stops and scenes over the local network. The engine stays the authority: the interface shows the state the engine reports and takes a gesture back when the engine rejects it.
Limits of this version
This page names the limits that matter in practice instead of implying more. What a release changed - and what it did not - stands in its release notes.
- Stop in the transport bar stops the sounding clips right away instead of waiting for the chosen quantisation boundary. Only that session-wide gesture is immediate: the stop of a single clip (on the iPad remote) and the stop a launch arms on a sibling clip of the same track follow the quantisation.
- An armed launch can only land while the playhead moves. With the transport stopped and the playhead between two boundaries, the slot stays armed and silent until playback starts; it only starts right away when the stopped playhead already sits exactly on a boundary of the chosen value - on bar 1 after Enter, for example.
- A clip is decoded in full before it can play: there is no streaming from disk, a file may be at most five minutes long and at most two channels wide, and all loaded clips together may not exceed 2 GiB. Clips cannot be edited yet - no trimming, no gain, no warping and no clearing a slot in this version.
Manual
Every control of this feature is documented in the manual - in English and in German, offline in the application and here on the site:
This feature arrived in MusicStation 0.3.0. Release notes for 0.3.0
Questions about this feature, or something that does not work as described here? Write to us: info@daw-musicstation.de