This toolbar presents several global parameters of the piece and how it is to be played.
Record: if you have a MIDI keyboard, instrument or sequencer connected to your computer, this button lets you record sequences using this device. See here for complete instructions on how to enter sequences and the limitations of this feature.
Play: plays the current selection, or the whole piece if no sound is selected. This is the same as the File > Play action. When a sound is playing or being computed, you can press the button again to stop it. If the shift key is held down, then the currently viewed area is played instead of the current selection. Tip: you can also activate this function by pressing the spacebar while the pointer is in the piece view.
Loop: specifies that you want the current sound to be repeated over and over, until the "pause" button is pressed.
Play quality: this combo box lets you define the sound quality at which you want to play back. The higher the quality requested the more time it takes to compute the sound before playing it. If you have a fast machine, you may simply leave this value to "high quality". You may lower the quality of the sound rendering to obtain better responsiveness on slow machines.
preview quality renders at 11kHz, medium quality renders at 22kHz and high quality renders at 44.1kHz. In all cases, the sounds use 16 bits per sample. The max dynamics setting renders at 44.1KHz, and involves a long precomputing phase that adjusts the global level to render with the highest possible dynamics. Use this option only for final renderings.
Note this action is only available in HighC pro. The default quality for the unregistered version is 22kHz.
Duration: This combo box lets you specify the duration of the full piece, in seconds. By default, it is set to only 8 seconds, so that you can play with the software rather than compose. However, you can set this duration to much higher values such as 600 seconds (10 minutes) without fears.