As you start working in the DAW, you'll find that there's numerous types of tracks that can be created. And I'd like to give a short rundown of the different types of tracks you might encounter and what they're used for. The first and kind of most common type of track is an audio track. And an audio track will hold audio. Called hold digital audio. Now some DAWs will have a separate type of track for mono and stereo. And some will allow you to switch between the two. I would suggest looking at your DAW and seeing what type of audio tracks it provides. The next type of track you'll run into is a midi track. And a midi track holds midi data. And we'll talk about midi and more specification, later in the lesson. But it doesn't hold sound itself. Doesn't hold digital audio. It holds kind of a real time score. Midi tracks are primarily used to work with external midi devices. Or with, routed to software synthesizers inside your DAW. Daw. The next type of track you'll run into are auxiliary tracks. And auxiliary tracks, you really don't record much information into them. They provide routing capabilities. So if I want to route, say, make a submix, which we'll talk about later in the course, which is collecting many audio files into a single place, I could use an aux track. Or if I want to set up parallel effects, I would use an auxiliary track. It really is just a routing tool. Though automation can be added to them, and we can also use them for signal processing purposes, adding audio effects to them. Another type of track that you'll run into is an instrument track. An instrument track is kind of special and that's the only type of track that inputs one type of data, but outputs another. An instrument track will receive midi data. And will have a software synthesizer of some sort. So in an instrument that listens to that midi data, but just kind of real time score.

And realizes digital audio as an output. So realizes something we can hear. We can think of the instument as kind of the performer. In that they're reading the midi score and they're outputting the audio data. So instrument tracks are kind of special in that regard. And finally, you'll run into global tracks. So there's many types of data in a DAW that don't belong in a single track, but refer to the entire song itself. And you'll find the data in a global track will be your tempo changes. Your meter changes, your markers and possibly your key changes. Now DAWs might have other types of global tracks as well. It'd be something to look into and see what exactly type of global tracks are available in your DAW.