For some time the monitors have included basic control of the track mute states. I’ve now updated the interface to provide much more control over this aspect of playback, which gives much more user friendly ability to isolate tracks when creating complex compositions.

All aspcts o this are controlled through the monitors widget, clicking on tracks will change the state of the track that it refers to. To make this easier, each monitor display has been enhanced with the track name.

  • Left Click - Mute/Unmute the channel
  • Shift + Left Click - Solo/Unsolo the selected channel.

While the interactions are quite simple, the system is a little more involved, mostly in ways that the user won’t see, but it is worth explaining the operation a little, basic understanding of this will help make sense of some of the ways it works.

Basically, the track states are stored in a stack. That is, when you change state, by Left Clicking a track for example, it pushes the current state down a list for that track, and creates a new state at the top, describing to the system the behaviour of the track, in this case, that it is muted. When you reverse the current state on the track, by Left Clicking again, the top state is discarded, and the previous state is restored, i.e. not muted.

This works for solo mode as well, however a Shift + Left Click interaction will affect the state stack for all tracks. If you click on channel 2 with Shift held, it will push the current state for all tracks, for tracks other than 2 it will set the new top state to silent, for track 2 it will set it to solo. Again, Shift + Left Clicking on the same track will reverse the state change, discarding the top state, and restoring the previous state for all tracks.

Using the stack approach like this gives the system inherent history, it knows about previos status and will restore as it changes. For example, if you mute some tracks, then solo another, when you un-solo that track, the previously muted tracks will remain muted. Another cool side-effect, you can solo a track, then Shift + Left Click to solo a different one, when you Shift + Left Click on the second solo’d track again to un-solo it, the previous solo’d track will be solo’d again, so you can quickly swap solo between two tracks just by repeatedly Shift + Left Clicking on the second track.

One more interface change to support this new capability, the pattern editor has been updated to fade out tracks that are muted or silent.

See the screen capture below showing the features of the new system described above.

Onwards and upwards…