Funky mute automation?!

Is there some known weirdness with mute automation in N5? If I write mute automation then play back to audition, it doesn’t always work correctly. I can watch the mute button change state but hear the track stay in the same state. However, if I manually touch the mute button with the mouse once after writing the auto, it seems to play back correctly.

I thought I was imagining this, or had some strange routings going on, but it’s pretty reproducible. Am I hallucinating? Is there a workaround?

Thanks,

Jason

I was really happy when suspend read of mute automation has been introduced… I would recommend you forget about mute automation as it’s working unpredictable! I don’t think it can’t be fixed as it’s conflicting with solo etc, etc…

Really?! Automation is supposed to be predictable! That seems like a showstopper for a post app. Is this well-known or just the two of us?

So now when my Pro Tools music colleagues ask me about Nuendo I can say the metronome doesn’t work, and when my post colleagues ask I can say mute automation doesn’t work.

It’s 2011. We were supposed to have flying cars by now…

Jason

I can only repeat myself - mute automation is dangerous and unpredictable. I wouldn’t use it anyway as if you press solo while writing automation by mistake it will write a bunch of mutes. If omit bugs…

Also you can say that Protools has no Pool, sample editor, interleaved tracks, its own bugs and so on :wink:

It’s true, none of them are perfect, but mute automation seems pretty fundamental, no?!

I also remind the PT guys that they’re stuck with RTAS…

Well, maybe you are right, but I get used to the fact mute automation is buggy so I abandoned it… I mean, it never worked normally in Nuendo.

I’m with Rustami on this one.
Mute automation just doesn’t work reliably. The only way you even stand a prayer of getting it close is by making absolutely certain you have an initial state set for the mute button on the start of every track - but even then it can get funky.
Use fader/volume automation instead - much better and far more reliable.

OK. I can accept that this is a fact. But it is still astonishing.

If you want any fun bedtime reading on the history of this fairy tale - search the old forums for “solo/mute issue” haha…enjoy :wink: It was a wild ride!

I would, but I’m not able to search the archives. Where’d the search button go?

You guys have great attitude about this. I am so stubborn. I hate the bug. It also effects solo. When I solo tracks that are being bussed to a group not all the tracks that are not soloed get muted. Very irritating.
I guess I will abandon mute automation. It’s crazy that nuendo sports such advanced automation features and that they can’t root out a bug that is so fundamentally wrong to the whole process of mixing.
Is pro tools really just as buggy? I was thinking of moving to pro tools 9 hd.

Yes, ProTools is buggy in its own way.

Pro Tools definitely has its own bugs, but I’ve never experienced broken mute automation.

For that matter, mute/solo is definitely weird in Nuendo even without automation. Just today I spent three minutes scratching my head looking at an unmuted track wondering why I couldn’t hear it. Nothing else solo’ed or muted. It had just been imported. When I finally toggled the mute on that track it suddenly started playing again.

Go figure…

Jason

re: solo/mute go to the old forum site and you’ll find plenty on this.

It boils down to Steinberg insisting that the “paradigm shifting” conception of mute/solo behaviour it is implementing (“forget how it was done before this is how it should be done”) is worth getting to grips with, because even though it may actually be counter intuitive, it’s fricken awesome. :wink:

It boils down to if my mute button is engaged, then I should never hear sound from that channel. If it is unengaged I should hear sound. Simple. This is not the case with Nuendo. I have to toggle mute automated tracks to hear them, mute automated tracks come flying on while I have the monitors way up listening to some quiet track I have soloed. It’s crap, it’s amatuer hour, it’s embarrassing. Fix it.

This is the last discussion i recall on the matter, shortly after N5 was released, there are different views on the issue, and there are some suggestions that might be useful.

Some people like the way Nuendo deals with this, while others simply want a DAW to emulate the operations of a physical console; though arguably there is no necessity for this other than serving to support habituated tendencies.

Personally speaking, in some 6 years of Nuendo use, I have not once faced a situation where I needed to automate muting, I’ve automated just about everything else, but never this. However, i think there should maybe be a global mute/solo behaviour option, so people can choose.

If SB cant figure out how to correctly implement mute automation, they should remove it as a feature and not leave it as a broken feature. Its broken when the mute button is lit and there is sound coming out of the channel. Its broken when I am soloing a track and mute automation on some other track opens it up and allows me to hear it.

Those issues are NOTHING to do with emulating any console in my book. They are broken behaviour/features…

Like I said - if there is no ‘need’ for mute automation - then why not just take that function out of the program? Fix it or change the paradigm and educate people on why it is better not to have it… :wink:

better to fix it then, i guess, then people have a choice, because if it’s removed, you can bet new users will complain about the “missing feature.”

“habituated tendencies”… Sounds like you’re talking about what people are used to, right?

If they want Nuendo to be competitive (and sometimes it really doesn’t seem like it) then getting engineers to jump ship from PT or Logic is necessary. So if those engineers are used to a certain solo functionality, then why not give it to them? Why have Nuendo be the odd one out? What goal does that serve if it doesn’t have to be that way?

I’d understand if it was a matter of screwing up the system completely, but that doesn’t seem to be the case to me. Fredo hinted at it in the thread you linked to above, but didn’t give specifics, so I remain unconvinced. I think it’s absolutely clear that if a track is not soloed, but has mute automated, it should not be playing if another track is soloed (see exception below). I think that’s fairly obvious.

I actually agree. I even think automating mute is a terrible practice. Now with DAWs we can use visual cues by muting regions/clips instead of not seeing whether a track is about to be muted. Much better visual feedback.

I’ll also agree with some that if you solo a group of tracks, and one track in that group has automated mute, then that automation should “play” and the track should switch between being muted and added to solo accordingly. So yes, there is nuance to this of course.