Are you trying to figure out how to export your songs with click tracks in Tracktion? I was in the same boat a few weeks ago. Long story short – it’s possible but it’s not a built in feature. I’ll show you how to do it, or at least how I did it.

Recently I had created some “drum practice” versions of new songs I was working on – basically just the full songs without drum tracks, and with a click track in place of drum tracks. I wanted to export these practice versions of songs as WAV files from Tracktion so that I could load them into my MP3 player and listen to them through headphones while playing along on drums. Seems simple enough, right?

After I spent some time digging through the Tracktion menus and in the Tracktion manual to find ways to export my songs with the click tracks included, I found that it just wasn’t possible. There is no feature or checkbox that simply says “Export with click track”.

Luckily enough there is an easy workaround, it just takes a few minutes of work to set up.

I ended up loading a metronome click sound into the built-in sampler module in Tracktion and then just made a midi track to do the clicks.

Here’s a screenshot of the song in question – notice the Metronome track I added at the bottom.

tracktion-exporting-with-click-track-01

To arrive at this point, I first started out by searching the web for free metronome click sounds. I found plenty, there’s lots of options out there. I downloaded a few different click sounds as WAV files so that I could experiment with which sound cut through the rest of the track the best.

After finding the click sound I liked best, I created a new track and called it “Metronome”. I added the Tracktion to the Metronome track and loaded the click sound I had settled on.

tracktion-exporting-with-click-track-06

I created a new, empty midi clip on the Metronome track and simply drew in the metronome beats/clicks, then adjusted velocity on the clicks that I wanted emphasized at the beginning of each measure.

tracktion-exporting-with-click-track-04After I had created one bar, or segment of clicks, then I just copied and pasted it throughout the rest of the track.

Easy enough.

What I like about using a sampler for metronome vs the metronome in Tracktion itself:

  • I can control when the clicks start and stop – which was nice for creating practice tracks. I was able to start the clicks one bar before each song so it was easy to coordinate when the song started during practicing.
  • I can run the click sound through the master mix and use limiting to keep my tracks from clipping when I cram the click sound on top of everything.

Hopefully this helps out somebody else out there. It’s simple enough but it took me a while to work out a good way to do what I was trying to do here.