User Manual

TRACK BASICS
119
The track type icon
Digital Performer provides the following types of
tracks, with the following icons to identify them in
the Track List:
Play/mute
The Play-Enable button engages a track for
playback. When the button is lit, the track plays;
when the button is empty, the track is muted. If
muted, the data for the track is still there; you are
just silencing the track during playback. Click the
button to toggle between these two states.
Any number of tracks may be play-enabled at one
time, but your MIDI and audio hardware resources
— the MIDI devices in your studio and the audio
hardware installed in your computer — ultimately
determine how many tracks you can truly play all
at once.
When Solo mode is engaged, clicking the play
button toggles between play-enabled (blue) and
muted (orange) or disabled (gray), depending on
its state before entering solo mode.
The Conductor track contains no MIDI or audio
data, so it therefore has no Play-Enable button.
Here are a few shortcuts for play-enabling tracks: to
toggle the status of several tracks at one time, just
drag (“glide”) over their play buttons. To Play-
enable all tracks except for one, command click its
play-enable button. To play-enable only one track
and unplay-enable all others, Option/Alt-click the
track’s play-enable button. This convention also
applies throughout Digital Performer to similar
toggle buttons, such as record-enable buttons, play
and record buttons in other windows (such as the
Sequence Editor), and Lock buttons in various
windows.
For important information about track soloing and
how it relates to the play-enable buttons, see
“Soloing Tracks” on page 213.
Solo exemption
When you solo a track, the track you solo plays and
all other tracks are muted. However, there are often
tracks that should never be muted, even during
soloing, such as master faders and aux returns. In
addition, there might be disk tracks that you wish
to always hear as you work (such as a tempo
reference of some kind). For cases like these, tracks
provide a setting called Solo Exempt, which appears
as a column in the Track List labeled XMPT. If you
click in this column for a track, it turns on solo
exemption for the track. This means that the track
will not be muted when other tracks are soloed. To
further indicate this, the track’s solo button in the
Mixing Board disappears. Master faders are always
solo exempt; therefore, their setting in the Track
List cannot be toggled. Aux tracks are always Solo
Exempt by default (although you can defeat their
exempt status, if you wish). Solo exempt status can
Icon Track type
Conductor track
MIDI track
Mono audio track
Stereo audio track
Quad surround audio track
LCRS surround audio track
5.1 surround audio track
6.1 surround audio track
7.1 surround audio track
10.2 surround audio track
Aux track
Instrument track
Master fader