Tracks and busses can be put into groups. The members of a group can be set to share various settings, which can be useful for managing tracks which are closely related to each other. Examples might include tracks that contain multiple-microphone recordings of a single source (an acoustic guitar, perhaps, or a drum-kit).
You can put tracks and busses into groups in various ways. In the editor window, a track's controls might look like these:
The green tab to the left of the track header indicates that this track is in a group called ‘Fred’. These tabs can be dragged in the editor window to add to or remove tracks from groups.
There are several ways to create track/bus groups:
Context-click on the group tab and use one of the "Create..." options there. You can create a group with no members, or one that starts with the currently selected tracks, or record-enabled tracks, or soloed tracks as it members.
Alternatively, clicking the ‘g’ button on a track header opens a menu which gives a list of the available groups; selecting one of these groups will add the track or bus to that group. This menu also allows a new group to be created.
Finally, the Groups tab of the Editor Lists or the Mixer Window has a "+" button at the bottom of the list that can be clicked upon to create a new group.
Context-click on a group tab and select Remove Group from the menu. Removing a group does not remove the members of a group.
You can also remove groups by selecting them in the Groups tab of the Editor Lists or Mixer Window and then pressing the "-" button at the bottom of the list.
Clicking the ‘g’ button opens a menu which gives a list of the available groups; selecting one of these groups will add the track or bus to that group. Selecting "No Group" will remove it.
You can also drag a group tab to add or remove tracks from the group.
Clicking on a group tab will toggle the group between being active and inactive. An inactive group will have no effect when editing its members. An active group will share 1 or more properties across its members. Tabs for disabled groups are coloured grey.
The properties of a group can be edited by right-clicking on its tab and choosing Edit Group…. This will open the track/bus group dialogue, which is also used when creating new groups:
Clicking on the color selector button allows the group's colour can be changed. This affects the colour of the group's tab in the editor and mixer windows. The color does not affect the color of the group members unless you also enable the shared Color property.
Following these options are a list of the things that the members of the group can share.
Gain means that the track faders will be synced to always have the same value; ‘Relative’ means that the gain changes are applied relative to each member's current value. If, for example, there are two tracks in a group with relative gain sharing, and their faders are set to -3dB and -1dB, a change of the first track to a gain of -6dB will result in the second track having a gain of -4dB (so that the difference in gains is the same).
Muting, soloing, record enable, route active state, colour and monitoring are all straightforward; they simply mean that all member tracks or busses will share the same settings in these respects. See Working With Tracks for more on these properties.
Selection means that if a region is selected or deselected on one constituent track, corresponding regions on other member tracks will be similarly selected. Corresponding regions are those that are at the same position and have the same length. Since region editing operations are applied to all currently selected regions, this is the way to make edits apply across all tracks in the group.
Context-clicking on the group tab offers a further menu of group-related actions.