Mutually exclusive mute for more than two tracks...?

[Fabian]

Say I have a bunch of tracks (more than two), one of which is un-muted, and the rest muted. Is there then any way so that I can click one of the muted tracks, have it un-mute, and all the others mute?

With two tracks, I can simply group the mute control of the tracks, and they will be mutually exclusively muted in the way I want. But with three or more tracks I cannot get this to work.

My specific problem concerns tracks within a folder, so a solution that assumes that would be fine, but a general solution would of course be better.

And the specific reason I want this is for referencing and switching between several reference tracks.

Thanks and Happy New Year

[FnA]

ALT click mute button "mutes all others" (than selected ones. Right click the button to see the other options)

Solo overpowers mute. "Lock Track Controls" stops buttons from working. For those you want to keep playing.

Breeder made save and restore mute and solo states slot actions relatively recently. I made save track selection slot scripts, still in not necessarily finished state, but seem to work pretty good (in my "Gizmos" thread). Spacemen Tree posted some "group" scripts that work kind of like that too. "XMas ReaScript" was in the title of that one.

Snapshots...

[xpander]

Ha, Lock track controls was the one I was trying to find, thanks FnA. That for the track(s) always playing, ALT + mute for the chosen reference.

[FnA]

Every night, before bed, read a little of the action list.

lol.

// mute all selected tracks then unmute the one under mouse cursor.eel

Undo_BeginBlock2(0);
extension_api("BR_GetMouseCursorContext", #windowOut, #segmentOut, #detailsOut);
trk = extension_api("BR_GetMouseCursorContext_Track");
Main_OnCommand(40730, 0);// Track: Mute Tracks
SetMediaTrackInfo_Value(trk, "B_MUTE", 0);
Undo_EndBlock2(0, "mute sel tracks except under mouse", -1);

and, I suppose,

// unmute all selected tracks then mute the one under mouse cursor.eel

Undo_BeginBlock2(0);
extension_api("BR_GetMouseCursorContext", #windowOut, #segmentOut, #detailsOut);
trk = extension_api("BR_GetMouseCursorContext_Track");
Main_OnCommand(40731, 0);// Track: Unmute Tracks
SetMediaTrackInfo_Value(trk, "B_MUTE", 1);
Undo_EndBlock2(0, "unmute sel tracks except under mouse", -1);

It would be possible to plot these out a little different. Setting the mute property can be (relatively) slow when there's a large number of tracks involved. The action list and button actions are faster.

[Fabian]

Thanks all.

I have tried the Alt+Click mute button, and all of the other actions I can find including SWS that relate to mute, I even tried making my own macros, but I simply cannot get this working the way I want. I do not want to mute all others, I just want to have a subset of the tracks (in my case child tracks) to exclusively mute each others when I click the mute button of a muted one of these tracks. Surely someone else has had this exact problem...?

Snapshots, I tried, it is too slow. When referencing I want to switch instantaneously.

I'll look into those scripts see if I can make them work the way I want it...

[lachrimae]

If I understand you correctly you could accomplish this using solo defeat on all tracks except for the ones that you want to toggle between.

No muting is used in this case...



If you have a large project you'd have to select a lot of tracks in order to apply solo defeat. Might be easier to select all of the tracks you want to toggle and then run the Invert track selection command (SWS) in order to apply solo defeat to everything else.
Or you could put all of your non-toggling tracks inside a master folder and solo defeat just that folder track. I think that'll work and would be much easier to manage.

[Fabian]

Hello all, and thanks for your help.

Rethinking this whole idea, I ended up putting all the commercial reference tracks as takes in a single item. Switching between them is not as quick as when muting/unmuting, but it is ok as I usually switch between them while my own track plays. The main thing is that having them as takes in a single item effectively lets me have mutually exclusive mute with just a single click.

So... if anyone is interested, the referencing setup I have now is the following:

The audio from my own piece is sent through a single "Main" track, and from there on to the master. The audio from my reference tracks goes through a "Ref" track and from there to the master. The Main and the Ref tracks are track control grouped wrt mute, so that muting one unmutes the other. The commercial reference tracks are takes in a single item on the Ref track.

Now I can quickly switch between the Main and Ref tracks by just using the Mute button on one of them. And I can (rather) quickly switch between the reference tracks by clicking the respective take. Also, I now only need the single Ref track that collects all of the referencing material (previously I had one track for each referencing track).

This works rather nicely, I think.

Thanks again for all your help, and I hope your new year has begun well.