#  | ### The Song Editor

The song editor is the place where all the previously created patterns can be arranged into 1 or more songs. The songeditor is the screen which you face first when Jaytrax is started.

### Putting it all Together

When you are ready with arranging you can save your masterpiece with the 'Save Song' button. Previously saved songs can be loaded with the 'Load Song' button. Note that songs which are zipped can be loaded too without prior unzipping it. Also note that there must only be 1 song in the archive, if there are more it is undefined which one will be loaded. The 'Clear All' button clears everything in Jaytrax. All songdata, patterndata and instrument data will be lost, so save everything first! A song in Jaytrax can consist out of more sub-songs. Every subsong is a song in itself but it shares the patterns and the instruments of the other subsongs. You can select a new subsong by selecting one out of the 'SubSong' droplist. You can rename the current subsong by hitting the 'Rename' button. The 'Delete' button removes the current subsong from memory and the 'New' button adds a new empty subsong to the list. On the bottom of the screen are the playback controls. The 'Play' button plays the currently selected subsong, the 'Pause' button pauses or continues the subsong and the 'Stop' button stops the playback. In the two 'Startpos' boxes you can select where exactly the subsong will start playing when you click on 'Play'. You can also set this figure by clicking on the ruler just above the graphical grid in the middle of the screen. The two 'Endpos' boxes you can select where the subsong must stop. If the 'Songloop' checkbox is set the song won't end when it reaches the 'Endpos' but it will continue (loop) from the value set in the 'Looppos' boxes. The playback speed of the current subsong is set in the 'Songspd' box and it is defined in BPM (Beats Per Minute). The beats per minute can be easily explained as: 'The number of times you tap your feet to a tune in a minute'. With the 'Groove' dropdown list you can automatically displace every 16'th note a little bit so that the music gets a groovy feel to it. The 'nr of channels' dropdown list let's you select how many audio channels are actually used. It is wise to always set this to the minimum of channels used. The more channels you use the more processor power you will lose due to the costly internal mixing and sound generation process. To monitor how many processing power your song is using at any given moment just watch the 'Processor Overhead' indicator. It tells you how much time percentage wise Jaytrax is using. Read the chapter about 'Optimizing Performance' to get some hints and tips about how you can finetune your song so it will be as resource friendly as possible. The large grid in the middle of the screen is a graphical representation of the currently selected subsong. Vertically stacked are 16 available channels and horizontally represents time. On every row you can insert the patterns you have made in the pattern editor. The 16 channels represent the possibility of playing upto 16 patterns simultaneously. See it as a 16 track taperecorder where you have 16 tracks of instruments playing. If you play the 16 tracks together, you hear the complete song. Patterns can be used more than 1 time. This doesn't only save time making the song, but it makes the song really compact too which is great if you are going to use your song on a webpage. The row with buttons left of the tracks with the 'M' on it can mute a channel. This is usefull for instance if you want to listen to your music with the solosound temporarily muted. The row with 'S' buttons mutes everything but a channel. This is usefull for instance if you only want to listen to a solo without the accompanying music. The 'R' button above them resets the mute status of all channels. To insert a pattern into the subsong you have to select first which pattern you want to insert by selecting it in the 'Patterns' Selectionbox located on the righthand side of the screen. After you have selected a pattern you can also browse through the patterns by using the cursor-up and cursor-down key. Now that you have selected a pattern to insert you must click on a pattern in the grid where you want to insert it. Note that the new pattern will be inserted before the other. To insert the pattern either click the 'Insert' button or hit the Insert-key. The length of the inserted pattern must be selected beforehand in the 'Patlen' dropdown-list. To delete a pattern you can select one and click on the 'Delete' button or hit the Del-key. To shorten a pattern you have to select the pattern you want to shorten at the point where you want to shorten it. Normally you can't select a pattern elsewhere than on the boundaries of a measure. To be able to select midway you have to set the 'Snap' dropdown list on a value other than 64. The 64 stands for the 64 notes a pattern can contain. If you set the 'Snap' to 16 for instance you can select every 16 notes (a quarter of pattern). The lowest possible selectable resolution is 8. After you have selected a pattern midway you can click on the 'Break' button to break the pattern in half and remove the second bit. The boxes with numbers just before every track specifies exactly how much of this track should be mixed through the echo effect. If you specify 0, none of the channel will be echoed, and if you specify 255 the track will be played as if it's recorded in the grand canyon. The echo time can be specified with the 'Delay time' value. This delay time is set in samples/second. Knowing that Jaytrax plays 44100 samples a second you can easily set the time to any exact figure you want. Say that you want an echotime of half a second, set the Delay Time to 44100/2 = 22050. Last but not least you can easily amplify your song by setting the wanted amplification in the 'Song Amplification' field. This value is how much (percentage wise) the song will be amplified.

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