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Find your way around

What is in the window, how the controls work and where each thing is done.

The window

The window has two parts:

• the toolbar, the dark strip at the top, always there;
• under it, one of three screens: Sample, Multitrack or Mixer.

Chop looks like a hardware sampler. The green panels are its displays: they show waveforms, blocks and lists. The red numbers in the toolbar show the position. A small light (LED) on a key is lit when the key is on.

The toolbar, from left to right

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The fields have no labels. Hold the mouse over any key or field for a moment and a tooltip shows its name and its shortcut.

The three screens

Everything you hear is made on the Sample screen. The Multitrack only places what you made there, and the Mixer balances it. Why it is built this way is explained in How Chop works.

The eight tracks

A project always has eight tracks, each with a number, a name and a colour. One of them is the selected track: the one the Sample screen shows.

• Press 1 to 8 to select a track, on any screen.
• On the Sample screen, click a track's tab (the row of eight keys under the top panel).
• On the Multitrack, click a track's row. Its pencil key opens the track on the Sample screen.

A track takes the name of the sample you load into it. To change the name or the colour, right-click the tab or the row. See Name and colour a track.

Pages that replace the screen

Some things open as a page: it takes the place of the screen, under the toolbar, and the screen comes back when you close it.

To close a page, press Esc, press its key again, or click a screen key. Playback goes on while a page is open, and Return and Space still work. The editing keys (Delete, Cmd+D and so on) do nothing, so you cannot change by mistake the screen hidden under the page.

How the controls work

In the picture: the green boxes with an arrow are menus; Fit and Loop are keys with a light; Pitch and Gain are knobs, with their value under them; Reverse is a metal switch.

Right-click any knob, fader or switch for its menu: map it to a MIDI controller, or reset it. See Control Chop from a MIDI controller.

Every knob can be turned while the music plays, and you hear the change at once.

Undo

Every edit can be undone: Cmd+Z, or the Undo key in the toolbar. Cmd+Shift+Z redoes. One drag of a knob, a marker or a block is one step, however long it lasted. The Edit menu shows what the next undo takes back.

What you select, where the cursor is and which screen you are on are not edits: undo does not change them.

Read the position

The red numbers show bar . beat . step, where a step is a sixteenth note. 2.3.1 is the third beat of bar 2.

• On the Sample screen they count inside the track's pattern, starting again at 1.1.1 each time it repeats.
• On the Multitrack and the Mixer they count in the song. When stopped they show where Play will start.
• While you listen to a single slice, they read slice.

The title of the window

The title shows the project's name: Chop - My Beat, or Chop - Untitled for a project not saved yet. A * after the name means there are changes you have not saved.

Where each thing is done