Solo and unmute with one mouse click?

[mustgroove]

One thing I do in Ableton all the time is have the last good bounce of a song on a track which is routed directly to the hardware output (i.e. not running thru the Master channel), so I can quickly A/B my current mix against the last bounce. In Ableton, I have this track on mute (so it's not playing while I work on the session), and when I wanna A/B I just quickly solo the track to check how the last bounce sounded.

I've figured that I need to the routing with Auxes (i.e. have one "mix bus" aux for the actual session and another "audition bus" aux for the previous bounce of the track), but the key to the workflow is the soloing - the previous bounce has to be muted most of the time, and I wanna be able to solo and unmute it in one mouse click, then un-solo and re-mute it again with another single click.

Is this possible?

[elicious]

control surfaces make this easy to do.
if you don't have one, you could make a grp with your whole mix,
then make sure your solo mode is set to x-or,
then solo back n forth with one clic.
or, get magic ab…
e

[Ben Jenssen]

I'm not at my rig right now so this is just theory, but it should work:

I'm naming the busses:
Bus 1-2: MIXBUS 1
Bus 3-4: MIXBUS 2
Bus 5-6: PRINT IN
Bus 7-8: PRINT OUT

All tracks output to MIXBUS 1

Aux 1 called MIX:
In: MIXBUS 1. Out: MIXBUS 2

Aux 2 called RELAY:
In: MIXBUS 2. Out: MBOX (Or whatever your hardware out is called.)

Audio track called PRINT:
In: PRINT IN. Out: PRINT OUT.

So, you have all tracks going to an aux (MIX) where you have possible master compression and the like. Its output is MIXBUS2.

The aux named RELAY outputs to the hardware. No inserts. It is only used to switch between inputs MIXBUS 2 and PRINT OUT. This is your switch.

---------

I've sent all my audio thru an aux for many years now, it has many advantages, most importantly its inserts are pre fader, master faders are post. Another thing is easy routing, like when I want to make a quick print of something, I set its output to PRINT IN, and rec enable my PRINT track.

In my idea above I just added another aux step (RELAY) between the MIX aux and the hardware to enable the switching between MIX and PRINT...
...with one click.

(I'm pretty shure I'll be implementing this in my standard template.)