Busses are a special kind of track that can be used to apply the same processing to multiple input tracks. A buss track by itself does nothing, there must be one or more other tracks feeding it via the Buss Out output FX (see Tracks and FX for more information).
Buss tracks have a special tab in the Mix browser for controlling volume levels, as well as a special Volume (Pre) controller for setting volume levels for incoming (pre-Phrase) audio.
There is always a Main buss that by default all tracks send to. This buss can be toggled on or off with the Tracks->Add Audio Track->Main buss menu item.
Temper C is limited to the Main buss plus 3 user busses.
FX are the basic data-handling objects in Temper. They are used to receive and send data, store and edit data, and process data.
Groups are a way to group tracks together. Currently, their primary purpose is to filter the visible notes in the piano roll: If you are editing a MIDI track and have any groups active, then only the track being edited and any tracks in an active group will be visible in the piano roll. Currently there are some experiments to use groups in other ways, for example, if you solo a track in a group, then it will automatically solo all other grouped tracks, but these are just tests and may change.
Temper C is limited to 4 groups.
Shapes control how MIDI data is transformed throughout the system. Think of them as a simple map that just takes one value and turns it into another. The most simplistic shape would be a line that goes from the bottom left to the top right, i.e. from 0,0 to 1,1. This shape is mapping every number to the exact same number -- it's doing nothing. For example, say you are modifying the velocity of note events with this line: It's going to receive an event with a velocity of, say 10, and then just map it to 10. Not very interesting. But by inverting the line -- making it go from 0,1 to 1,0 -- we've inverted the transformation, so a velocity of 0 becomes 127 and vice versa.
Shapes by themselves do nothing. They must be applied to a context, such as in the example above. You will find shapes used throughout Temper to perform different kinds of processing.
Tools are used for editing MIDI data. They are only available in the Track browser, when working with a MIDI data or a controller strip of an audio track. Tools are extensive in Temper: While all the basic operations are available from a 3-button mouse, there are a variety of special tools for specific tasks. Most advanced tools use shapes, defined above.
Tracks are responsible for recording, editing and performing MIDI and audio data. The are composed of FX, processing objects used for each of these tasks. A typical track has an input FX for receiving MIDI from a MIDI keyboard or audio from an audio device, a Phrases FX for storing MIDI or audio data, and an output FX for sending the data to an external device (for example, MIDI can be sent to a MIDI sound module, audio can be sent to an audio interface). Tracks can be more complex in a variety of ways: They might have processing FX inserted between the input and the phrases or the phrases and they output; they might have a VSTi FX that converts MIDI input to audio output; they might have links between other tracks in the song, creating a complex processing graph; they might send audio data over a buss that acts as input to another track.