Mute Choirs

[Fourniture]

Your idea

A feature that mutes whole choirs of instruments, so you can listen to only one or two choirs. Very rough visualization:

Problem to be solved

It is cumbersome to mute every other instrument in a full score if one wants to listen to just the strings, for example. This feature would help to streamline the workflow.

Prior art

No response

Additional context

Admittedly, there are some problems with this idea, (e. g. if someone has an unconventional score order, then there may not be any recognizable choirs), but something like it is needed. Note: Not the same as #24800

Checklist

• [X] This request follows the guidelines for reporting issues
• [X] I have verified that this feature request has not been logged before, by searching the issue tracker for similar requests

[iainhallam]

Sibelius solves this by having extra mixer channels for groups of instruments - Brass, Strings, etc. When you change the fader on the group, all the others scale so they maintain their relationship to each others and don't lose information (as opposed to simply adding/subtracting the value of the group fader, which might lose relative information as faders reach the ends of their travel ranges). Not sure whether mute/solo work on groups, but would be fairly simple to implement.

[bkunda]

I think we'll end up solving this by enabling range/list selection for channel strips. This would allow you to operate on multiple channels at once.

[iainhallam]

I think we'll end up solving this by enabling range/list selection for channel strips.

After which there'll be an inevitable feature request for the ability to save selections as groups so you don't have to keep making the same selection, which is error-prone 😄

[Fourniture]

Why not? 😆 This does bring up an important point though, because of the "Rhythm Section" in Jazz, the different voices in Baroque, and more. Maybe the mixer's manner of showing choirs would be directly tied to the score order (which already gives a pretty good idea of the style.) I'm not a big fan of the program assuming too much or trying to do everything for you like Sibelius does, but this might be a necessary path. Having the user save preselected choirs does sound good.