Ableton/Live/UG/08 Clip View/02 Main Clip Properties Panel
- The leftmost panel: clip region and loop, time signature, groove and scale.
- The region and loop decide what plays when a clip launches. An unlooped clip plays from start to end, or until stopped.
- Type start and end values, or press Set Start and Set End during playback to set them at the playhead, quantized to global quantization. Warped audio shows bars-beats-sixteenths; unwarped audio shows minutes-seconds-milliseconds.
- The Clip Loop toggle loops the clip over Loop Position and Length, which defaults to the whole clip. Audio clips must be warped to loop.
- During playback, Set Loop Position moves the loop start to the playhead and turns looping on; Set Loop Length then ends the loop at the playhead, capturing a loop on the fly. With looping off, Set Loop Length ends the loop at the playhead keeping its length, and turns looping on.
- All of these can be MIDI mapped, for example a rotary encoder that walks the loop through a sample by the quantization step.
- Sets a clip's time signature for display only; playback isn't affected. Independent of the project's meter, it makes polymetric combinations easy to spot.
- The Clip Groove chooser picks a groove from the Groove Pool. Hot-Swap Groove picks a new one from the browser, replacing it in the clip and the Groove Pool.
- Commit writes the groove into the clip and turns the groove off. On audio clips, positive groove velocity becomes a volume clip envelope, overwriting any existing one. See Ableton/Live/UG/14 Grooves.
- The Scale button turns Scale Mode on for the clip; Root Note and Scale Name set the scale.
- In audio clips the scale doesn't change playback; it's passed to scale-aware devices. In MIDI clips, the scale's keys are highlighted in the piano ruler. See Ableton/Live/UG/10 Editing MIDI.