Questions about Mute Groups

Riff

I've been messing around with the new mute groups and I think I need some clarification. I use mute groups on my XR-18 mixer for muting/unmuting the band quickly using the Mixing Station app.

It works like I think it should. Hit my button for the mute group, and all of the channels in that group are muted. Hit it again, and they unmute. If I hit it to mute everything but then want a couple channels unmuted, I hit the mute buttons on those tracks and they unmute. If I hit the mute group button, then the rest of them unmute.

Or, if I have a couple channels muted already, then hit the mute group button, the rest of the channels mute.

Now, in ST4, it works differently. Just hitting mute group 1 mutes and unmutes as expected. But if I turn on the mute group and try to unmute a single channel, nothing happens. But hitting mute group again after attempting to unmute a channel, it seems to remember that I hit mute. So when I click the mute group button to unmute the group, those channels now stay muted.

Something else that I'm wondering is that mute groups in ST4 are song/track specific, so nothing global. I may just be thinking wrong, but wouldn't mute groups make more sense on the output buses? It sure would be a lot easier to set up my library if I were muting buses instead of tracks to accomodate the situation.

peter

Mute group implementation is often mixer dependent. In ST4 mute groups have precedence over individual mutes. So if you have a mute group engaged you can not unmute individual channels in that group.

The mute group assignments are track specific. But the mute group state is global. Mute group assignments are included in the "Apply to Similar Songs" feature. So if you have the same track layout, you can quickly assign groups for multiple songs in one go.

On the output buses you already have bus mutes. You could use buses as mute groups.

Mute groups are superior if you run for example only one stereo output and want master fx on that output, then you route everything to a single bus with the master FX and with mute groups you can still mute certain tracks globally.