Mute and solo tracks

Mute silences one track. Solo silences every other track, so you can hear one part of the mix by itself. Neither touches the picture.

Menu: Track ▸ Mute AudioTrack ▸ Solo
Where: The speaker and headphones switches in the track headerThe track's right-click menu
Agent tools: set_track

Mute a track

Click the speaker switch in the track’s header. Every clip on the track goes silent, and the picture is unaffected. Click it again to bring the sound back.

Mute Audio in the track’s right-click menu does the same for the track you clicked. Track ▸ Mute Audio acts on the current track: the track of the first selected clip, or the front track when nothing is selected.

To silence one clip and not its whole track, use its own Mute.

Solo a track

Click the headphones switch in the track’s header, or choose Solo in the track’s right-click menu or the Track menu. The tracks beside it go silent: the other timeline tracks or, inside a nest, that nest’s other tracks.

You can solo several tracks. All the soloed tracks play, and the rest are silenced.

Solo shows a checkmark in the Track menu while it’s on. Neither Solo nor Mute Audio has a keyboard shortcut. Each click is one undo step, named “Mute Track” or “Solo Track”.

How mute and solo combine

Mute always wins. A track that’s both muted and soloed stays silent.
Solo doesn’t look at what’s on the track. A soloed track with nothing on it still silences the rest, as a mixer’s solo button does.
Pictures stay. A silenced track still draws. To take a picture out, use Hide Video, which leaves the sound playing.

See what a solo silences

Under a solo, the waveforms on silenced tracks draw faded, as they do on a muted track. Their speaker switches stay unlit, because a speaker shows that track’s own setting and not what a solo is doing to it. So the waveform tells you what you’ll hear, and the switch tells you what you’ve set.

Mute and solo in nests

A solo only reaches the tracks beside it:

A solo on a timeline track silences the other timeline tracks, and a nest playing on one of them goes silent with it.
A solo on a track inside a nest affects only that nest’s other tracks.

Muting the track a nest clip sits on silences everything inside the nest. A new nest’s tracks copy the mute and solo of the tracks they came from, so a muted track’s clips stay silent once they’re nested. Un-nesting doesn’t keep what’s set on the nest’s tracks.

In an export

Mute and solo are part of the project, so the export hears what you hear. A silenced track isn’t in the exported mix, and it writes no stem. If every track is silenced, Frame Job won’t write stems.

Good to know

The switches are plain toggles. ⌥-clicking one does what a click does, and ⌥-clicking the header away from its switches selects the track’s clips.
A scrub plays the same mix, so mute and solo silence it too.
The header’s other switches are on The track header.

With an agent

set_track sets the same switches. Name the track and pass muted or solo as true or false. It’s a direct setting, not a toggle, so asking for what’s already set changes nothing. See Tools: tracks, markers and canvas.