Are you trying to figure out how to export your songs with click tracks in Tracktion? I was in the same boat a few weeks ago. Long story short – it’s possible but it’s not a built in feature. I’ll show you how to do it, or at least how I did it.
Recently I had created some “drum practice” versions of new songs I was working on – basically just the full songs without drum tracks, and with a click track in place of drum tracks. I wanted to export these practice versions of songs as WAV files from Tracktion so that I could load them into my MP3 player and listen to them through headphones while playing along on drums. Seems simple enough, right?
After I spent some time digging through the Tracktion menus and in the Tracktion manual to find ways to export my songs with the click tracks included, I found that it just wasn’t possible. There is no feature or checkbox that simply says “Export with click track”.
Luckily enough there is an easy workaround, it just takes a few minutes of work to set up.
I ended up loading a metronome click sound into the built-in sampler module in Tracktion and then just made a midi track to do the clicks.
Here’s a screenshot of the song in question – notice the Metronome track I added at the bottom.
To arrive at this point, I first started out by searching the web for free metronome click sounds. I found plenty, there’s lots of options out there. I downloaded a few different click sounds as WAV files so that I could experiment with which sound cut through the rest of the track the best.
After finding the click sound I liked best, I created a new track and called it “Metronome”. I added the Tracktion to the Metronome track and loaded the click sound I had settled on.
I created a new, empty midi clip on the Metronome track and simply drew in the metronome beats/clicks, then adjusted velocity on the clicks that I wanted emphasized at the beginning of each measure.
After I had created one bar, or segment of clicks, then I just copied and pasted it throughout the rest of the track.
Easy enough.
What I like about using a sampler for metronome vs the metronome in Tracktion itself:
- I can control when the clicks start and stop – which was nice for creating practice tracks. I was able to start the clicks one bar before each song so it was easy to coordinate when the song started during practicing.
- I can run the click sound through the master mix and use limiting to keep my tracks from clipping when I cram the click sound on top of everything.
Hopefully this helps out somebody else out there. It’s simple enough but it took me a while to work out a good way to do what I was trying to do here.
What samples did you settle with? Where did you get them? Personally, I’m fine with tracktion default click, but I can’t find it on disc? Shouldn’t I be able to read that default click straight into the midi sampler?
I don’t even remember at this point where I found my click samples, but doing a web search for metronome click samples seems to find lots of options with a little digging around. I hadn’t thought about trying to find the Tracktion click samples, that’s an interesting idea. I wouldn’t know where to look to find those though. I suppose a person could record that click and make a sample of it to import.