From the course: Cubase Pro 10 Essential Training: The Basics

Playback and transport options - Cubase Tutorial

From the course: Cubase Pro 10 Essential Training: The Basics

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Playback and transport options

- Let's take a quick and closer look here at the various transport options available to us. Here's that vocal file heard earlier. The most tactile and immediate way to start playback of the project is to simply tap the space bar on your keyboard. That's its shortcut. Alternatively, simply click the green play button found at the top of the user interface in this transport bar. It's not the only transport bar, as we'll see in this tutorial. Anyway, here's the start of the vocal file, we've heard it before. Have another listen. ♪ Well I can't find words. ♪ ♪ The ones you never heard.♪ - Obviously we used the stop button to halt the play head at that stopped position. That's a preference you can set up in the preferences panel, that we'll look at, at a later point. Anyway, we've stopped here. You'll remember this mini view of the transport bar, also offers us the blue, sort of purplish color there, cycle or loop buttons, too. When activated, this creates a similar color ranged ruler area, that will loop between the start and then locators set by us. If you wish to quickly move them, left click the small white triangle, at the top of each, and drag to a new bar position. Maybe move the left locator from bar three to bar two, and the right locator from bar 13 to 14, or whatever. Okay, it's as simple as that. Now, I'm just going to move them back to surround the event length. Now, a quick way to do that, though, is to have the event selected, and hit the P key on your keyboard. Anyway, at present, we see these four buttons within this transport panel. If I want to see more functions, I would roll over that very small triple dot icon, click, and drag to the right, to expand into view the other options. Notice the tooltip says you can either click or drag it. We saw this in action earlier, so I'll not do it again just yet. I prefer to keep it set like this at its smallest view. And the reason I have it set like this, is because it gives me the essential functions at the top of the screen. If I need the further functions, I have the duplicate transport panel expanded, that sits at the foot of the screen. Anyway, obviously, that's up to you how you want to set up these two views of the same transport buttons. You might prefer to have this footer version contracted, to save space down here, whilst having the header version expanded. Now, I'm going to do that for this tutorial, so now expanded, we see the extra playback control buttons. They are straightforward enough, but you can roll over any of them to see a tooltip pop-up, informing you exactly what they do. So, clicking that first button only sends the playhead to the start anyway. Its partner button, to the right, sends the playhead to the end of the event selected. So, the first button will now return the playhead to the start. And we get this pair of buttons, too, that allows us to click and hold to move the playhead across the timeline, at a faster rate. We don't hear the audio played back, though. This helps if you want to move to a particular point that is not locked to a bar. Of course, we have the cycle and stop buttons, as well as the start and record buttons that we have seen in use earlier. So, those are the transport buttons. We can also use this button over here, to actually hear the audio played when we click on an event. So, if I click here, I'll hear the audio from that point in real time. - ♪ The ones you never heard ♪ - Or here. - ♪ And if I ever find ♪ - The play button has a partner button that allows us to hear the audio as we scrub over it. Click its small drop-down to flip over to the scrub option. And then left click the event, and drag over it, forwards or backwards, like this. - ♪ The ones you never heard ♪ (music playing backwards) ♪ - I'll change it back to the play button, and select the selection tool. We can further access transport and playback options, by using the menu. Click transport to drop down, and access all of these textually indicated options. You will need to fly out to access all of the options. I'll come back to this again in a moment. If you wish to see a floating transport panel, click the top option. And we now see this very long transport panel, with many more options available to us. It's a floating panel, as I say, so you can click and drag the corner there to re-position it. But if this size is too unwieldy, go to the right-hand side to click the cog icon to set up transport options that are visible to us. Any of these with a tick means they are presetnly visible. Obviosuly, any without are presently not on show. I'll make the system performance meter visible, for example. And there it is now at the far left of the transport. This does, now, make it even more unwieldy, though. It would be better if this was stackable, maybe, over a few rows. But we can't do that. But maybe it's something that Steinberg should look into. Anyway, I'm just going to close it down for the moment by clicking its small close down cross there. Obviously, it's best to set this up to display just the extra functions that the other transport panels don't offer to us. Anyway, as I say, we can use the menu to drop down from transport, to access all these further options, with their shortcuts, too. Now, speaking of shortcuts, if you want to bring the large floating transport panel back into view very quickly, use the shortcut F2. Okay, so that's a quick run-through, then, all of the different transport panel options available to us.

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