As said before, tags let you assign some properties to the sounds so that you can retrieve them later easily. They are simple keywords, such as "bassline", "contrapoint", "melody", "part1", "part2y"... that you can invent on the fly and let you organize your piece according to your taste. A sound can have as many tags as you want, and as many sounds as you want can share the same tag. Tags replace both tracks (or voices) and parts in a regular audio editor, merging the two concepts in one, simpler and more general one. With tags, you control the visibility of a set of sounds, select or deselect those sounds, and can perform global operations on all the sounds that share a common tag. You can also assign tags to a specific pattern, in order to retrieve it and edit it easily.
Most interaction with tags happens in the Tag Manager, at the bottom of the main view. This panel is organized in three input areas:
The View > Show Tags action lets you show (or hide) the tags associated to each sound in the piece. Those are displayed as a vertical list of names at the start of each sound.
Use the tags at creation text field to specify a list of tags that will be set to all newly created sounds. Separate those tags with a space or tabulation. Press return to validate your changes. As you draw or paint sounds, those are created with the specified tags. You see those tags in the global tag list at the left of the tag manager.
To assign an existing tag to a set of sounds, select those sounds either with the select tool or some other edit action, then click on the tag you wish to assign: a context menu appears. Choose "Set": all the selected sounds now contain this tag. As a side effect, this tag is now colored in dark blue to indicate that all selected sounds contain this tag.
To create a tag and assign it to some sounds, start by selecting some sounds. You can not create a tag without having it assigned to some existing sounds in the piece. Then, type the name of the tag in the "create tag" text field at the bottom right of the tag manager.
The tag cloud is the most common way to access all tag managerment functions. By clicking on a given tag, you can perform a set of operations that deal with this particular tag and the current selection:
Don't forget that to view the tags associated with a particular sound, you can use the View > Show Tags action.
Tags are useful to retrieve and act on sets of sounds that have a common logical property. To this effect, the Select and Deselect actions let you select/deselect at once all the sounds that correspond a specific part or voice. Then, you can edit them collectively after that, for instance, changing their level (Edit > Set Level...), moving them, transposing them, setting their envelope, waveform, or cop/paste them.
Tags are also useful to focus on a particular part of your composition, such as a bass line, a rythm part or a melody. To this effect, you can use the Show and Hide actions as well as the View > Zoom on Selection action. As long as some sounds are hidden, they cannot be selected nor edited.
It is suggested to set the first sounds you create to a "voice1 part1" set of initial tags. Then, as you progress vertically or horizontally in your piece, replace either the voice1 with voice2, or part1 with part2. Then, you will provide some useful structure on your piece to manipulate it easily, at very little expense.