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Arrangement vs. Session

Gloopy shows the same music two ways. Understanding what each view is for — and what they share — is the key to moving fluidly between sketching an idea and committing it to a finished song. Press Tab to cycle Arrange → Session → Mixer.

The same clips, two layouts

Both views work with the one thing Gloopy is built around: clips — blocks of notes or audio that own their content. Neither view is a copy of the other's data; they're two arrangements of clips on the same set of tracks.

  • Arrangement is the timeline. Clips sit at fixed positions along a bar ruler, left to right, and the playhead sweeps through them once. This is the song as it will be heard start to finish — and it's the only thing that gets rendered.
  • Session is a grid. Columns are tracks; rows are scenes. Each cell holds a clip you launch live, on a musical boundary, in any order you like. Nothing here has a fixed position in time — it plays when you fire it.

When each earns its place

Reach for the Session view to explore. Loops, variations, and "what if the chorus drums came in here?" belong in the grid: launch clips, stack a whole scene, try an order, change your mind — all without disturbing a timeline. It's a performance and sketching surface.

Reach for the Arrangement to commit. Once you know how the song goes, you lay clips out on the timeline in the order and at the lengths you want. This is where a song becomes fixed, editable in detail, and reproducible.

The two aren't walled off. You can capture a session performance into the arrangement, and copy an arrangement clip into a session slot — so an idea found by launching can become part of the song, and vice versa.

Why renders come only from the arrangement

Session launching is live: which clip is playing depends on what you fired and when. That's the opposite of what you want from a render, which must be deterministic — the same file every time, whether you bounce it now or in CI next week.

So Gloopy draws a firm line: the offline render always comes from the arrangement, never from live session playback. A launched session clip overrides its track's arrangement playback while you're performing, but it is not on the render path. Lay the part into the arrangement and it will render; leave it in the grid and it stays a live-only idea. (See the two control lanes for the same live-vs-structural split on the scripting side — it's the same principle, one layer down.)

One transport, one mixer

Whatever you're doing, there is exactly one transport — one tempo, one playhead, one clock — and one mixer. Switching views never switches songs; it only switches how you're looking at the one you have. A fader move, an effect, a mute applies the same in both, because there is only one signal path underneath.

See also