Best options for effectively muting/unmuting the master track?

I want to mix my songs while listening to assorted reference tracks. My current approach is to run two instances of Renoise. One has the song I am working on, the other has multiple tracks where each track is a reference song (i.e. the just play a giant wav file).

With the reference instance I can easily toggle what song is playing by soloing tracks.

What i want is to be able to mute one instance ofRenoiseand unmute the other. And, ultimately, haveallthis controlled by OSC (or MIDI if need be) so I can automate the coordination of track switching and muting/unmuting the audio sourceskh.

I’m somewhat stuck at picking the best way to mute a Renoise song without stopping it. I have two approaches. As best I can tell you cannot actually mute the master track. The workaround is to insert a gainer, set it to -INF, and toggle it on and off.

This works, but to control this via the default OSC commands means you have to calculate the master track index for any given song. Not terrible, but not ideal.

My second approach is to insert an empty track at the beginning of the song, and use OSC to toggle soloing. This seems to work, though I’ve not fully tested with enough songs to see if there might beresidualaudio still coming through.

This approach has the advantage in that I would not need to change the OSC message; I also solo/unsolo the first track. It’s a bit hacky in that every song now has a track whose only purpose is to manage song muting.

Are there other ways to accomplish the muting of a song while not stopping it?

I’ve considered writing a custom OSC handler (or OSC-enabled tool) that would assume the presence of a muting gainer on the master track (perhaps checking for a custom device name). That would solve the problem having to hand-calculate the master track index, but it’s also more work :slight_smile: (I suppose that tool could insert this special muting gainer if it did already exist. Interesting challenge.)

OK, so, it being Sunday and I’m farting around binge-watching “Z Nation” I thought I’d take a crack at a tool.

I now have a functional version that will locate the master track and look for a device with the display name of “NG MASTER MUTER”. If not there then a gainer is added with that display name. Either way the gainer is set to -INF and deactivated.

The tool runs its own OSC server and listens for custom messages to set the “is_active” value on the gainer.

https://github.com/Neurogami/renoise-ng/tree/master/lua/com.neurogami.MasterMuter.xrnx

I’m still curious to know if there are better ways to mute an entire song without stopping it.

The gainer thing was the way I did it for similar results in toggle reference track, though for the way the tool works I had to use a lot of gainers :slight_smile:

http://www.renoise.com/tools/toggle-reference-track

Not sure if there is a neater solution to be honest.