Single Track 3: Working from a Script

About fifteen minutes. Bring a script, or any text you would like to read aloud.

If you read from a script, you have probably said “the” when the page said “this” and never noticed. Single Track Mode can keep your script right beside the waveform, and with Follow-Along turned on it listens as you read and marks every word you said differently. Think of it as a proofreader who never blinks.

1. Bring In the Script

Tap ShiftV (with the waveform active) and the script pane slides out at the right of the waveform, in the drawer that also holds the Cookbook, the ClipView and the Keyboard Guide (one at a time, whichever you asked for last). Tap ShiftV again to put it away; it comes back to the width it last had, and you can also drag its bar.

• Open a script you already have: Script ▸ Open Script…, or drop the file on the pane. Plain text, Rich Text and Word scripts work (a PDF can be read, but not followed).
• Write one right here: Script ▸ New Script. The pane is an editor for text and Rich Text, and your changes are saved a moment after you stop typing.
• Make it readable: the + and − buttons change the text size, and FastTracker remembers it for that script.

2. Turn On Follow-Along

Open FastTracker ▸ Settings…, click the Recording tab, and tick Follow-Along in the strip at the bottom. It needs macOS 26 or later (on an older Mac the box is greyed out), and the first time it may fetch Apple’s speech files, so be online. The full story is in Follow-Along.

3. Read, and Let It Listen

1. 1With your script showing, tap R and read.
2. 2A pale gray highlight follows you through the script. When you say a word differently, a hot-pink flag appears in the strip just under the ruler, and the same word turns pink in the script. (Expect it about three seconds after the slip: FastTracker judges a finished sentence at a time.)
3. 3Tap R again to finish.

Follow-Along is easy on you and strict about slips. It lets through “two” for “2,” money, percents, names, words that sound alike, and a different ending. A little word (“in” for “and”) swapped for another, or a word you added, gets a “check this” flag, a hollow pink triangle in the strip under the ruler, so you can listen and decide. Where you read a line again, numbered circles (1, 2, 3) mark the takes. It would rather miss a real flag than cry wolf.

4. Fix the Flags

• ↓ jumps the playhead to the next flag, ↑ to the previous one. The script scrolls to show the word, so you hear what you said and see what you should have said.
• To fix one, mark the bad stretch and press Delete, put the playhead where it was, tap R and read the line again. What you record goes in right there and everything after it moves along, flags included.
• ⇧⌘F (Script ▸ Clear All Proofreading Flags…) starts over. It asks first, and ⌘Z brings them back.

5. Words You Won’t Read

A script often holds words that are not for reading aloud: a title, a producer’s note, “(pause here).” Drag across them in the script pane and click Skip in the pane’s header. They turn amber and are never flagged. Select amber words and the button says Don’t Skip. A producer’s note without brackets (a b-roll line, a heading) has to be marked with Skip yourself, or it counts as words you never read. Anything in ( ) or [ ] is skipped for you, automatically, when a script is loaded and as you type or paste it.

6. Already Recorded It?

Recorded without Follow-Along, or edited since? Choose Script ▸ Sync Recording to Script. FastTracker listens to the recording much faster than real time and lays the script and the flags against it. If the script is not the one you read, it says so and changes nothing. A project synced in an earlier version should be synced again, to get the newer flags.