ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. Welcome to the series of instructional videos at Gearwire.Com on the REAPER digital audio workstation product. Today, we’re going to take a look at navigation and zooming features in REAPER.

Now, you can navigate a REAPER project, and I’ve got one open here. Using the mouse or the keyboard or a combination of both, being able to do predictable and sensible navigations with the keyboard is one of the most time-saving features of any digital audio workstation software. If you can avoid mousing, you should (a) because what it basically means is is that you can change states or operate the program at the speed of your thought and the speed of your fingers rather than having to lift up your fingers and go grab the mouse.

Now, we’re going to start off by adjusting the panel width. To adjust the panel width of the track panel area, and that’s what this is, all you do is place your mouse over the vertical border that separates the track control panel area from the main workspace area until the mouse indicator changes to a little double arrow, click and hold, and then drag left or right, pretty straightforward. Release the mouse button away and you have it where you want it. Now, if you want to adjust track height, you click and you drag the mouse up and down on the lower track boundary and here’s an example, and in order to adjust the height of all selected tracks, we can hit shift, select a bunch of tracks -- whoops, whoops, [LAUGHING] -- Okay. Let’s try this again. You can select all the tracks and then you can hold Alt and click and drag the mouse up and down on the lower track boundary, so hold down Alt and they will all expand at the rate or contract at the rate that you’re trying to get happening, and then there is yet another option.

If you want to adjust the height of all tracks period without bothering selecting individual tracks, or actually let’s expand yourselves so that we can -- If you want to expand the height, for example, or just the height of all tracks, you hold down Ctrl and click and drag on the lower boundary, and all of those will react. So, Alt for selection of tracks and Ctrl for all tracks at once.

Now, let’s take a look at how to navigate between tracks. You can move from one track to another by clicking the required track with your mouse, okay, and actually let’s open these up a little bit here. Just click on tracks individually, and by default Ctrl-Alt-Up and Ctrl-Alt-Down are the keyboard shortcuts for moving around in the track control panel area from one track to the previous track. So, let’s try that.

[ROB WARMOWSKI NAVIGATING AROUND TRACKS IN COCKOS REAPER]

Yeah, that’ll do it.

Now, if you do this a lot, you may prefer to be able to use just one key for each of these tasks rather than three, and you can, and especially if you happen to be using a handheld microphone while you’re doing a video screencast like I am. So, you can use preferences to define your own keyboard shortcut for this or any other purpose, and the example that I’m about to give the up arrow key will be defined as being used to go to the previous tracks. So, what we do is we choose options and preferences, and then select the category “keyboard control”. There we go. We click on the “new” button, we press the up arrow, we display the action, drop down list, and scroll down and click on track>go to previous track. And as you can see, there’s a whole bunch of stuff here. Track>go to previous track, there it is. Click OK, click OK again, yeah. All right. And then all you end up having, all you have to do at that point is hit the up arrow as you return to the previous track.

So, that’s some of the powerful features and navigation and zooming inside of Reaper. Keep your eyes up and open on Gearwire.Com for more videos in the future, and thanks for watching.