AV News 190 - Novembert 2012
Audacity
John Smith APAGB CPAGB
You will see from Peter's preceding article that 'yours truly' managed to get involved
in the discussions on the Forum - in fact at times it must have looked to the 'forum
experts' that we were mounting a two pronged attack! Poor old Steve and Gale
must have wondered what had hit them (especially when in my ignorance I kept
refering to Gale as a 'her' when in fact it turned out to be a 'he'!).
Here are some of the suggestions we made in trying to resolve the problem:
Thank you for your patience with Peter and I as we try to get some sort of resolution
to a problem that was flagged up by a reader of 'AV News'. The main surprise that
has come out of all this is that the sound that you are listening to whilst you are
mixing your masterpiece is not necessarily the sound that you are going to
export. Why on earth do we need to be listening to what we have now termed the
'playback mix' - surely it would be much simpler to always listen to what is actually
going to be exported.
If we solo tracks - that will be reflected in what we hear, if we mute tracks - that
will be reflected in what we hear - and even if, unintentionally, we happen to hit both
mute and solo - the missing track will be noticed in what we hear.
Therein lies the solution - we need to always listen to the final product.' and....
'Having followed all the recent postings there was a sudden shaft of light in
something that Peter wrote. He suggested why not call the 'solo' button the
'monitor' button?
The 'mute button' removes that track from both what you are listening to and
from the exported track so that is relatively straighforward.
The 'solo button' on a track (or multiple tracks) can be an extremely useful
feature when comparing or listening to individual and multiple tracks however it only
affects what you are listening to - ie monitoring - it does not have the slightest
effect on what is going to be exported. Therefore why not ask the programmers
to simply change the name of the 'solo' button to 'monitor' as this is a more
descriptive title of what that button does?'
Goodness knows if this will ever happen - but we did try!!!
So what are my own conclusions?
If you choose to use 'Solo' set in the 'Simple' mode:
What you hear in the 'Monitor mix' is exactly the same as in the 'Export mix'.
'Solo' does exactly what it says - logically only one track at a time can be soloed
and this is the only track that is exported.
Depressing the 'Mute' button mutes that particular track in both the 'monitored'
and 'export' mixes.
If you choose to use 'Solo' in 'Standard' mode:
When the 'Solo' button is depressed the other tracks go grey and are not heard
when listening - however looking at the mute button/s you will note that they
are not depressed and so these tracks are still going to be exported.
'Solo' is used as a monitor button allowing the user to monitor a track or tracks
but its use has NO EFFECT on the export mix.
When the 'Mute' button is actually depressed that particular track will not be
heard or exported........and whatever else you do, before you export make sure
that you haven't depressed both Mute and Solo - you know it doesn't make sense!!
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