If you put a clip into folder Material\Bank9\F1\ openTZT will be played automatically at startup. You may put a test screen there. Are there more than one clip, the others will be treated like any other clip. Always, the clip that is assigned to Q will be played. Even if the parameter skip_q = 1 is set in tzt.ini.

• If you aren't using Esotic's effectors, you are seriously missing out.
• Keep a separate subdir tree of your Material folder structure outside the openTZT root. In fact, keep a couple. One should only have a clip or three. Move that one to the openTZT root when you want to start openTZT fast (the more clips it has to load the longer it takes to start up.) The value of additional Material trees is that you can custom tune them and then move them in an out of 'production' as needed for gigs and such.
• Develop a standard idea of how to use your clip banks and F*'s. For instance, you could always use F9 in each bank to store interstitials, text, logos or such. If you get in the habit of using the banks and F*'s consistently it will save time in a gig when trying to find something special.
• Organize your effectors so that the most commonly used group together. If you use the config switch that changes effector groups when you change clip groups, then put the effectors you will commonly use with those clips in the same F* and Bank.
• If you find that you use the same clip mashup over and over, consider using the record feature of openTZT to save them as a single clip. This will save time in a gig. Alternatively you can use presets.
• If you're using a laptop, consider making a dedicated external keyboard with color-coded keys. It's cheap and it will make you faster. Alternately consider using something like the Nostromo Speedpad N52 to give you some extra keystroke macros and dedicated keypad.

• The most common problem is that, while loading up clips at startup, openTZT dies. Watch the count very carefully to get some idea of which Bank and F# is where it fails. It is almost always a 'bad' clip that is shutting the app down. Generally it is a codec problem or some other issue. Remove the offending file and it should start. If you can't find it any other way, remove all the subdirs in the Material tree and add them back one at a time until you find the one that breaks it.
  You can also turn on debugging in the tzt.ini. openTZT then writes a debug.txt file where you may find some hints what caused openTZT to crash.
• Long filenames cause this behavious too, try and keep filenames less than ?38? characters.
• Sometimes the whole thing gets constipated and slows to a frame or two a second. Start clearing out players and banks you aren't using. Beware the xBPM speed settings, they often contribute to this problem.
• OpenTZT wasn't initially designed to work in background, so it will stop rendering if the window ist not active. (we're working on that issue)
  What's more important: due to this design openTZT doesn't "like" it if you change task by Alt+Tab, usually it will crash so badly that you have to kill the process with the task manager.

If you want to contribute you don't have to be a programmer. We need a lot of help especially for non-coding parts of the project.
You can contact any of the project admins via the sourceforge page

We need (from important to less important):

• beta testers (desperately)
• writers for the documentation
• programmers, of course
• lots of different files with lots of different codecs to test with (see supported file types)
  
• people who spread the word about how great openTZT is ;-)

• Triplet
• MoRpH
• Esotic
• Jens
• WYSIWYG
• PiedPiper
• pleXus
• You! if you start contributing to this amazing Open Source project