The Tracktion Waveform manual as a Wiki: please contribute, our joint efforts are welcome!

[talby]

The Tracktion Waveform manual as a Wiki: please contribute, our joint efforts are welcome!

How to contribute to the Wiki?

Find the current manual as a Wiki here:
https://github.com/Tracktion/waveform_m ... User-Guide

On this page follow at the top left the link to the "Code" page:
https://github.com/Tracktion/waveform_manual
and find the information:
"can be contributed to by people with a GitHub account"

So, enter with your GitHub account that site and on the "Code" page follow on to
"docs/waveform_user_guide" and then "Waveform-User-Guide.md" and land here:
https://github.com/Tracktion/waveform_m ... r-Guide.md

At the top right you can now find an "Edit this file" activation option. Once activated that view of the Waveform-User-Guide.md file for editing, well, place your contribution into the document.
I recommend to have your snippets of text readily prepared and on that editor page just paste them to the correct position.

---

For those new to Tracktion Waveform and interested in the history of the manual:

The idea to improve the manual by maintaining it as a Wiki was brought up some years ago, as documented here in the KVR forum in 2014:
T5 Wiki (videos, tutorials, etc) - input required
Since then it was online at the following address:
https://wiki.tracktion.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
Unfortunately it didn't find much resonance in the community, almost none. I am not sure anymore how I did it, maybe not even on that page but by contacting the Tracktion support team, but when I proposed my text for a chapter about Waveform on Linux, this was welcomed and the snippet indeed made its way into the updated version of the manual.

Digging the internet a little bit, I found that the manual mainly appears to exist because of the efforts which Bill Edstrom put into writing it for Tracktion 6 and Tracktion 7. As far as I interpret the publicly available information, he wrote a manual and tried to sell it for making good for the immense efforts it took him to produce such manual:
https://leanpub.com/guide_to_tracktion_t7
"Keep in mind this is not an official manual. Despite that I continue to work closely with the Tracktion Software team to make it as accurate as possible, this book does not cover 100% of features of the Tracktion DAW."
A manual for T8 was planned, obviously in even closer collaboration with Tracktion, but then never took off on that site:
https://leanpub.com/tracktiondawuserguide
Instead, we can see that a T8 manual is the oldest one published free of cost available on the Tracktion site, then:
https://assets.tracktion.com/pdf/2024/w ... -guide.pdf
And unsurprisingly, the current manual for W13, the one which is now maintained as a Wiki, still honors his great work. It starts mentioning right at the beginning, before anything else becomes explained:
"© 2020 - 2021 Bill Edstrom
© 2024 Tracktion Corporation"

Bill Edstrom also has a series of video tutorials marketed, and according to the user reviews on that site these videos are from some 9 years ago:
https://www.groove3.com/browse/daw/tracktion
Nowadays there is such series of video tutorials from him freely available, targeting the DAW meanwhile rebranded as "Waveform" and to his series covering version Waveform11 it is linked to from the Tracktion support site. On his YouTube channel "Inventive Gear" are much more Waveform videos, covering some of the topics up to current version WF13 and some videos are dedicated also to features only found in the PRO version.

It's worth to study them, like it is also worth to study all the other material provided and linked to on the Tracktion support site! The material is not outdated as its publication date makes it seem like. Almost all workflows having been explained in the past are still applicable in the same way also for the usage of the recent Tracktion Waveform version.

---

Now that the idea to update and maintain the manual in a Wiki is eventually promoted again, return to the top of this post and join in!

[gigazaga]

Bill Edstrom here. Thanks for getting this effort going again. Much has changed since I wrote the original Tracktion version as an independent book!