Where is the mute button?

Dorico
1

Hi,
Sorry, I’m sure this is yet another stupid question, but where are the M and S buttons that mute/solo specific instruments? I thought it would be to the right of the instrument in Play-mode, but I can’t find it (see attached), and now spent 20 minutes on it (the manual is not much help…). The Play menu has ‘solo’, “'remove solos"and “remove mutes””, but not “mute”, very strange and - in this context - quite frustrating.

Thanks!
Annotation 2019-10-02 104251.png

2

I would have looked there too if I didn’t already know the answer, and it might be convenient to have the additional option to do it there sometime in the future … but what you want is in the mixer:

mixer.png
mixer.png818×552 33.5 KB

The advantage to having it in the mixer is you can keep the mixer window open even while in write mode, so you don’t have to go back and forth to play mode if this is the only thing you’re needing. The disadvantage, at least on Mac, is that weirdness in the QT framework sometimes makes the mixer window seemingly disappear; sometimes showing all app windows will locate it, but sometimes I’ve had to just hit the mixer button twice to re-invoke it.

Also, you are aware that you can solo a stave … or even a non-contiguous on-the-fly group of instruments, just by selecting them in write mode? There’s occasionally a bit of an art to it, but in most cases (with a few exceptions detailed in recent threads), if you select an entire measure for each instrument you want to hear, only those instruments will play back. Personally I find this a lot more useful than the mixer; in the mixer I only use those buttons when I want a semi-permanent change to go into effect.

3

Top trivia: there used to be mute buttons where you’d expect them, but they didn’t work properly. See solo and mute buttons gone from play mode? - #3 by snakeeyes021 - Dorico - Steinberg Forums

4

Thanks guys, found it now. Yes, I’m familiar with “soloing” in write-mode (it’s similar in Sibelius), but it’s mainly the mute button I needed (typical arrangers situation: arrange from a piano into orchestra, then you want to mute the piano you arranged from).

Even without those button, it seems to make sense to add it to the Play menu (just like those solo and unmute/unsolo functions).

While looking in vain, I noticed that slider with “All voices” next to it, seems to mute/unmute the piano, but it doesn’t do that for other instruments. Odd. Not that I know what that slider does, of course, as is the case of 95% of the play-mode functionality (which I’m not particularly interested in anyway, I just want basic playback).

5

Maybe no help to JustusR, but in the spirit of completeness in case someone else finds this thread in the future: another option is to select “to end of flow” on the stave(s) in question, and toggle on “Suppress playback” in the bottom-left corner of the bottom panel.

p.s. Next time “notation software” is the theme at pub trivia night in London, don’t go up against Leo; you’ll lose all your money …

6

Thanks, Samread. That is actually very handy (particularly now I’ve discovered that “mutes” are unset when you switch playback template, which I do rather frequently because of performance issues. So another reason maybe to bring it back into the play-mode interface itself).

7

Sorry you weren’t able to find what you were looking for. In case it helps you or others in future, muting/soloing tracks is documented here, and if you scroll down the list of topics on the left, there are nearby topics for muting/soloing instruments and muting/soloing (“suppressing the playback of”) individual items, like individual notes or pedal lines etc.

8

Thanks Lillie, you’re quite right it is there. I had in fact looked in the documentation, but had accidentally googled myself into an older version, which is no longer applicable. It won’t happen very often that old documentation is no longer valid and misleading, but I will be more alert about this in the future.