Preferences
General
Scroll waveform during playback: When this is checked, the window will automatically scroll to keep the green playback marker visible when it reaches the right edge. You can still scroll manually to other parts of the waveform. Turn this option off to prevent the window from scrolling automatically.
Make new document when no files are open: This feature automatically creates a new document when there are no other files open when you click on the application icon in the dock or double-click the application icon in the Finder.
Default Zoom: This sets the horizontal scale of newly opened and created documents.
Scratch Disk: This sets the location in your file system where Sound Studio stores its temp files, which contain audio data that is being recorded and processed. Ideally, this would be a large and fast hard disk. Since audio is stored as 32-bit float at the file's sample rate, this data can be very big. One hour of stereo, 44.1 kHz audio takes up about 1.2 GB of hard disk space. Since every change is stored and kept on disk to support unlimited undo, the scratch disk will fill up over time as changes are made and filters are applied, until the file is closed or Sound Studio is quit. By default, the scratch disk is the system "tmp" directory on your system disk.
Audio
By default, Sound Studio uses the audio input and output hardware selections from the System Preferences. You can specify that Sound Studio use a specific hardware device for input and another for output. You can also specify which channels to use for each device.
Most computers have built-in audio hardware, and this would show up as "Built-In Audio." If you have installed or plugged in some other audio hardware, such as a USB or FireWire audio device, you can select it in the preferences. The selection here only affects Sound Studio, so you can have Sound Studio play audio to one device while other applications play audio on another device.
The input column controls the audio recording or capture hardware. The output column controls the audio playback hardware. The first two lines select the device and source. The source usually refers to the port to use on that device. On some devices, there is only one port, and the source pop-up button may be disabled to show that you can't change it.
The left and right channel selections determine which channels in the device map onto Sound Studio's left and right channels. Sound Studio can record up to two channels at one time from the input device. On playback, it mixes down each track in a file based on its pan settings to create a stereo mix that is sent to the selected channels on the output device.
Play-through in to out: Turning this on will preview the audio on the inputs by immediately playing input audio on the audio outputs. Be careful about feedback: if the speakers and microphones are too close or pointed at each other, you may get feedback. Play-through is useful for monitoring your recording through the computer, to make sure you have the levels and connections set up properly.
Open Audio MIDI Setup: This opens the Apple-supplied application "Audio MIDI Setup" which is used to configure audio hardware connected to your computer. It can be used to set the native sample rate and format of the hardware, which is important because you may want to record at a higher than normal sample rate. Sound Studio will continue to work when there is a mismatch between the hardware sample rate and the file sample rate, by resampling the audio.
Colors
The colors used to draw the main waveform views, markers, and grid can be changed. They can also be reset to their factory defaults.