MU.LAB offers the well-known arrange and piano-roll editor concepts for composing your music.
The arrange page is called the Composer, as it's used to create and edit Compositions.
A Composition is a composition of Parts.
A Part is a one of these blocks you see in the Composer, and it can be an Audio File Part or a Sequence Part.
An Audio File Part, or short: Audio Part, plays an audio file from your harddisk.
For each Audio Part, you can set the start location within that audio file. This can be done in the Audio Lab.
You can open the Audio Lab by double-clicking or right-clicking the Audio Part, or by pressing the TAB key.
A Sequence Part plays a Sequence, which is a sequence of Events (e.g. Notes) that make up a melody, rhythm-groove, filter-sweep etc...
Each Part is routed to a Target, for example a Rack with a virtual synth, which turns the received events into real sound.
You can set the Target for a Part via the Part Property Panel at the top right of MU.LAB's main window.
The Sequences themselves can be edited in the Key Editor and List Editor, by double-clicking or right-clicking the Sequence Part, or by pressing the TAB key.
Most of the time, you'll use Racks as Targets for the parts in your composition. A Rack is a collection of plugins that process your audio and events and route it to an output.
All of these objects (i.e. Compositions, Parts, Sequences, Racks, etc...) are part of a Session. Note that you can have more than 1 Composition in a Session.
To finish this brief overview: At the top of the screen you'll find 3 panels: The Main Menu, the Transport Panel and the Part Property Panel.
The Main Menu contains 3 menus to access application-global functions like "Open Session" and "MIDI Setup" etc...
The Transport Panel let you start and stop the sequencer, start recording, set the tempo and so on.
The Part Property Panel shows/edits which Target is used for a certain part, which Audio File or Sequence it plays, etc...
Last but not least: Note that a lot of MU.LAB's functionality is located in the context menus which popup when you Right-Click (OSX: Control-Click) the relevant object!
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