In large projects with say 250+ tracks, i use the “Disable Audiotrack” a lot to save cpu and to reduce overall latency.
But why is it still not possible to disable Group and FX tracks in the year 2023?
Now i have to make an FX chain insert preset for every group channel and remove all plugins one by one.
You could argue that vst3 plugins “know” when they are not being used. But in real life there are still older vst2 and dsp powererd UAD plugins that need to be fully disabled to actually free up space.
Thank you for reading this
I use “a trick”, which is obviously a workaround
The “constrain delay compensation”, and I put the threshold at minimum [0,1 or 0 don’t remember], so when I use it all plugins in the project are virtually disabled, including FX return and GROUPS
if you still wanna do it manually, something that could help is the “reload track preset” function available on every channel: groups, S-Track and so on [probably you know it]. You can reset the channel then recall a preset, all with a couple of clicks. [it doesn’t recall the send settings though]
Thanks. I don’t use it to record midi without latency but because my projects are so large (even with the fastest cpu around and my soundcard at 2048 samples). I need to disable tracks to be able to work properly and export mixes. While my actual cpu is at say 30 percent the Asio meter is 85 plus percent and start to crackle. The only solution is to disable plugins i dont need at that time of exporting.
You welcome
I think you didn’t write what you wanna do exactly, that’s why is hard to help
As stated, try my solution, not to “record midi”, but as a workaround to disable ALL PLUGINS in your project, if that’s what you need
-constrain delay compensation
-threshold at minimum
-activate it
But this trick will disable ALL PLUGINS, don’t know if it’s good for your
No… I only need to disable certain tracks including all their plugins. e.g. I have a project where 5 different drummers play a take on a song. In the end only one will be used. The others will be disabled for another time or a different version of the song. That’s 16 drums tracks in a group times 4, makes 64 tracks plus 4 groups. And that’s just the drums 
Well if you need to disable tracks ‘alternately’ that’s easier than ‘disable plugins on a track’
If you have precisely titled/named the single tracks you can solve this with the PLE in 5 minutes
You just need to compile the presets, then you can assign [for example]
CTRL+SHIFT+1 (enable all drummer #1 tracks, disable all drummers 2/3/4/5 tracks)
CTRL+SHIFT+2 (enable all drummer #2 tracks, disable all drummers 1/3/4/5 tracks)
And so on
With PLE you can’t disable groups or FX send though, but if you can route all the drum tracks to the same groups you have this solved 100%
Thank you. But the point is that most of the cpu hungry plugins are on the group tracks. This post is to make sure this will be possible in the future. And every drummer has it’s own sound settings. So all drummers to one group is not a solution.
You welcome, just brainstorming for a workaround
As stated in my first answer, there could only a workaround, not a proper solution
Anyhow you should open a feature request thread
Good night and good luck!
I never do this, but, is it not possible to just place the inserts in “bypass” for the entire track?