Thank you for the continued responses and ideas. It sounds like I need to explain my situation a bit more…
I lead music at my church. My backing tracks always consist of drums, and sometimes other instruments. I am accompanying one or more singers, and usually have one or more other musicians playing along, as well. I am usually playing keyboards or a real piano. I do not use a click track, partly because I hate hearing them, and partly because we do not use IEMs. Many of our songs will start with piano and vocal, then the drums will come in later, perhaps on the first chorus. I want to see the metronome of the starting tempo of the song so that I start the song at the right tempo. That way, the drums don’t sound too fast or slow when they come in. I want to be able to press my ‘start’ pedal at the moment the backing tracks should start. Pressing it a measure early would be okay, but the point is that when I press the pedal, that moment needs to be beat 1 of a measure. If I use a Flex Loop to give me the metronome before the tracks come in, we will inevitably drift from the metronome somewhat, so when I press the pedal, the playhead could be anywhere in the loop. Then, it will play through until the end of the current measure before it jumps to the next song part, where the drums and other backing tracks should start. This whole problem would be sovled if VST Live simply allowed for the visual metronome to play even when the transport is stopped.
I don’t mean to sound flippant, but am I the only one that ever needs to start the backing tracks mid-song, after some purely live intro? This seems like such a common thing to do, yet it appears I am the only one with a need to have the metronome run with the transport stopped. I am curious how others deal with this. Maybe everyone just uses IEMs and a click, so they play to the click from 1.1.0, regardless of when other tracks come in.