Starting at the top and working down, the first thing is the waveform screen.  This window shows you a graphical image of the audio clip that you have loaded.  This screen is where you set the start and end points for your loop.

Below the screen are two sliders labeled Zoom and Scroll which do pretty much what their names say.

Next are the control buttons.  Starting with the red dot, that's the record button.  Recording isn't working yet, but I hope to get that working real soon now.  Next are the play and stop buttons, then the skip buttons that jump you back and forth to the various markers.  The markers are the start of the clip, the start of the loop, the end of the loop and the end of the clip.  Each time you click one of the skip buttons it takes you back or forward to the next marker.

The bottom row of buttons deal with the looped section.  Notice in the wave window how part of the blue waves are surrounded by pink.  The pink section is the looped region, Phraser will play the audio in the pink section over and over.  You can select some part of the audio by clicking your mouse and dragging it left or right.  You can fine tune your selection in several ways:

• Drag the left or right border to move the start/end of the loop.
• Drag the entire selection area by dragging somewhere other than the edge.
• Several keyboard shortcuts described later on.
• You can do all of this while Phraser is playing so you can hear immediately what your loop sounds like.

  So, back to those buttons on the bottom row.  The first one will scroll the screen so that the beginning of the loop is visible.  If you are zoomed in this is a quick way to see the start of the loop.  The next button scrolls to the end of the loop and the third button adjusts the zooming and scrolling so that the entire loop is visible.  The next two buttons select everything and nothing.

Next are the Load and Save buttons.  Load let's you load a file from your computer and Save let's you save your loop as a new file.  You can load WAV or MP3 files, but not all formats are supported.  If Phraser won't load your file then try a different file.

When you save your file you may want to compress it to make it take up less disk space, and more importantly, to make it download faster.  The Compress when saving checkbox tells Phraser to compress the audio file.  If you don't tell it to compress then the file will be saved as a regular WAV file.  The WAV file will be ten to twenty times bigger than the compressed file but will probably sound better.

The bar beneath the buttons is a status and progress meter.  It lets you know how things are going when Phraser is busy download or doing other things with the audio.

Finally there's the audio output selection.  It will use the default output unless you tell it otherwise.  If you have multiple sound cards, or perhaps a USB headset you can send the sound there instead.