Transport controls are, put simply, how you move (or are transported) around the track. Several of these buttons will likely be familiar to you if you have used a remote or video player, but for clarity I will define each.
1. Performance/usage indicators - these indicate whether midi is being inputted or outputted, current CPU usage, disk usage, current sample rate with total plug in delay below, as well as the maximum amount of continuous recording that your hard drive can hold.
2. Current cursor position - These indicate where in the track your cursor currently is in both seconds as well as musical measures
3. Transport controls - in order from left to right: move to previous marker, rewind, fast forward, return to start, stop, play, record, loop. The numbers on the end show the current start and end point of the loop.
Just to the right of the transport controls are the metronome controls, these control the metronome but some can also modify the recording function.
Recording Controls:
1. Overdub/Overwrite mode switch toggle- Toggles between the overdub recording mode (where newly recorded MIDI data will be merged with the existing data) and overwrite mode (where newly recorded MIDI data will be overwritten and previous versions will be deleted.)
2. Preroll toggle - Toggles preroll, which plays a the section of music before it starts recording.
3. Recording settings - will pull up more granular recording controls
4. Auto-Punch toggle - Auto-Punch allows you to rerecord smaller sections with relative ease. How it works is that it will take a section that you have selected and will turn on the recording for the duration of the selected segment and otherwise disable recording for not selected segments.
Metronome and Time
5. Precount- Will play the metronome for a set number of measures before starting recording.
6. Metronome setup - allows you to set up preroll and precount amounts as well as beat and accent sounds.
7. Metronome toggle - enables the metronome
8. Project time signature - allows you to edit the time signature of the project
9. Tempo - allows you to adjust the tempo or speed of the song.