To play a MixPad project move the play cursor to the position you would like to start from and click the Play button at the bottom left side of the screen. Alternatively, you can press the space bar as a quick way of toggling between play and stop. Click the Fast-forward and Rewind buttons to search through your audio, or click the Go to Start or Go to End buttons to quickly jump to the start or end of the selected track.
Playing the mix using the Scrub tool can be useful for locating specific sections while working on your mix. To playback your mix in scrub mode, click the Scrub button located in the controls at the bottom of the project window. You can also press 'F6' to toggle scrub on or off. Once playback is in scrub mode, use the Left and Right arrows to navigate through the mix. Playback with scrub begins slow and increases in speed as you hold the arrow buttons down.
In MixPad, if you click the Stop button, playback will stop and the cursor will return to the position it was before you started playing. This is so you can easily test that your cursor in the correct location without losing the position of your cursor each time you play.
You can also pause playback by hitting the Pause button or pressing the 'P' key. In this scenario, playback will stop, but instead of the cursor returning to its original location, it will stop exactly where it was when you pressed pause. You can then resume playback by pressing pause again or the play button.
If you hit the Play button while playback is already in motion, playback will restart at the position the cursor was at when playback was first started.
You can select a specific region of your project if you want to focus your work on that area. Drag the mouse in the MixPad timeline area and this will create a highlighted region. Now when you click play, MixPad will start playing from the cursor position, and if currently, the project is in loop mode, MixPad will loop playing the highlighted area once it reaches the end of region. If you start playing after the region end, then MixPad will just play to the end of project instead of looping. To deselect the selection on the timeline, either click the Clear button on the timeline, or press Ctrl+D.
You can save your project as a .mpdp file with a data folder(same name as project file with a .ProjectData postfix) and then load it for use again later. When you save a MixPad project, all audio files are saved into the project's data folder. This means that if you want to move your project to a different computer or location, the things you need to save are the project file and associated data folder.
The timeline can be viewed in either minutes and seconds or in bars and beats. To toggle between the two, click the timeline mode button located above the play controls and just right of the loop button.
Loop Play Mode
To loop a section of your MixPad project over and over, turn loop play mode on by clicking the loop mode button, located on the Recording tab toolbar (also found just above the Play button in the lower left corner of the MixPad window). Next, select the portion of your project you want to loop by clicking and dragging in the timeline area beneath the tracks. When you click play and the cursor position is before the end of region, MixPad will play from current cursor position and once reaches the end of selected region, the selected region will loop as long as the loop play mode button is activated.
Adjusting BPM and Time Signature
In the same area as the timeline mode button (under the tracks), you can assign a new beats per minute (BPM) to the project and change the time signature. If the timeline mode is set to bars/beats, adjusting the BPM or time signature will update the markings on the project timeline.
View Grid Lines
Using grid lines will help line up loops and pieces across several tracks. To turn on grid lines, click the grid lines button to the right of the timeline mode button, just above the play controls. You can also toggle the grid lines by pressing Ctrl+G. Note that if you change the BPM, you will have to reset the grid lines by turning them off and back on again.
Metronome
Playing a metronome during playback will help you align tracks with the master tempo of the mix. To toggle the metronome on and off click the metronome button, located below the tracks in the lower left corner of the project window. Note that you may need to enable the metronome in the Options dialog on the Metronome tab before the metronome is available for use from the project window. See the Options - Metronome section of this manual for more information on metronome options.