Tracks and busses can be put into groups. You can set members of a group can to share various settings - useful for managing tracks that 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 group tracks and busses 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’. You can drag these tabs to add or remove tracks from a group.
There are several ways to create groups for tracks and bussess:
Context-click (right-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.
Alternatively, click the ‘g’ button on a track header to open the Group menu. The menu lists the available groups. Selecting one of these groups will add the track or bus to that group. The menu also lets you create a new group.
Finally, the Groups tab of the Editor Lists or the Mixer Window has a plus (+) button at the bottom of the list. Click on the plus sign 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.
Click the ‘g’ button to display a menu with a list of the available groups. Select one of these groups to add the track or bus to that group. Select "No Group" to remove it.
Alternatively, you can also drag a group tab to add or remove tracks from the group.
Clicking on a group tab toggles the group between being active and inactive. An inactive group has no effect when editing its members. An active group will share one or more properties across its members. Tabs for disabled groups are coloured grey.
To edit the properties of a group, context-click (right-click) on its tab and choosing Edit Group…. This opens the track/bus group dialog, which is also used when creating new groups:
Click on the color selector button to change a group's colour. 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, 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.
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. For more details see Region Selection Equivalence
Context-clicking (right-clicking) on the group tab offers a further menu of group-related actions.