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title: Adding Pre-existing Material
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<p>Many sessions will involve the use of pre-existing material, whether it consists of audio and/or MIDI data. Using existing samples, loops and riffs from files stored on your system can be the basis for a new session, or a way to deepen and improve one that is already underway. </p>
<p>There are four pathways for importing/embedding an audio or MIDI file into a session. </p>
<ul>
<li><code>Session &gt; Import</code></li>
<li><code>Region List context menu &gt; Import To Region List</code></li>
<li><code>Track context menu &gt; Import Existing Media</code></li>
</ul>
<p>These methods are all equivalent: they open the "Add Existing Media" import dialog. Once the dialog is open, you can choose to add new audio as new tracks, as regions in the region list, or as audio in the selected track. You can change this behavior once the dialog is opened. </p>
<p>Finally, you can also easily import files into your project by dragging and dropping the file from some other application (e.g. your platform's file manager such as Nautilus or Finder). You can drag onto the Region List or into the desired track or into empty space in the editor track display. The file will be imported (copied) into your session, and positioned at the mouse pointer position when the drag ended.</p>
<p>This chapter covers the following:</p>
  





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