Suggested improvement for Mute/Solo controls

[LeeJames]

Hi guys. I really like Audacity and would like to humbly submit a suggestion for how the mute controls could be improved.

First, here is an image I made to show how my idea might look:
http://oi57.tinypic.com/34eb9tj.jpg

The changes are:
• No more separate "Mute" and "Solo" button on tracks - just one checkbox on each track.
• New "Mute" panel at the top with three buttons, giving universal control of muting method.
• Button 1: "Mute: Selected" - mutes selected tracks (checkboxes say "Mute").
• Button 2: "Mute: Unselected" - plays only selected tracks (checkboxes say "Solo").
• Button 3: "Mute: All except cursor" - plays only the current track where the cursor is (checkboxes grayed out).
• Also includes a volume control for "partial" muting, so you can still get a sense of what the muted tracks are playing.

I came up with this idea in order to solve two problems:
1. At the moment there is no easy way to hear only the current track (under the cursor). So for example if you want to quickly inspect what each track contains, you can't without constantly having to go over to the "Mute" options. I wanted a way to be able to inspect (and work on) individual tracks without having to worry about muting controls.

2. When multiple tracks have "Mute" and "Solo" turned on, it can be confusing which tracks will play and how the Solo and Mute controls interact. By having just one control on each track, this makes it vastly easier to understand which tracks will play. There is no confusion about what will cancel out what.

[steve]

Thanks for the suggestion.

1. At the moment there is no easy way to hear only the current track (under the cursor).

Try setting the Solo button behaviour to "Simple" in "Edit > Preferences > Tracks"

There is also the shortcut Shift+S to Solo the "current" track (the track that has "focus", as indicated by the yellow border around the track).

[LeeJames]

Thank you Steve. This works, though it is not at all intuitive and requires looking through the prefs.

Perhaps the keyboard shortcuts for control panels could appear as popup tooltips, so we could learn them quickly without having to delver into the prefs?

[steve]

Perhaps the keyboard shortcuts for control panels could appear as popup tooltips, so we could learn them quickly without having to delver into the prefs?

Yes, I agree that the shortcuts should be more easily discoverable, but unfortunately there are technical reasons why tool-tips don't work for the mute and solo buttons, so that is currently a "feature request".