Solos

This is kind of an issue, not really tedious actually, but things just don’t get the way I feel they should - at least unless I’ve done something wrong and didn’t notice.

Suppose you have some sends from tracks to different busses, that may serve as different types of reverbs (typically one send per track, even more than one per bus). What you hear when you listen to a “solo” track in Ardour 0.99.3 is the sounds on that track plus their reverbs and all reverbs for every other track. What IMO you should hear is the dry signal of that track; instead, in case you activate the solo on the bus which carries the reverb for that track as well, you should hear the dry+wet signal for that track only, and not for any other track that sends signal to the bus.

This is my point of view and could be discussed (one could argue that everything on the bus should be heard whenever the bus is on “solo”, in case you mean the solo as destructive); however one thing is sure, the way it works currently is incorrect because it makes no sense that sounds on the bus are heard when they’re not on solo and some other track is.

Ardour’s current solo model works like this:

  • solo a track: all other (non-soloed) tracks are muted
    post-fader, but all busses continue running normally

  • solo a bus: all other (non-soloed) busses are muted
    post-fader, but all tracks continue running normally

this was necessary for us because ardour’s busses are capable of being used with direct connections to JACK, unlike the busses found in traditional mixers which only accept signals from internal sources. this of great use to people using ardour as a live mixer or FX processor.

we experimented with several different models for soloing but found that no single model was perfect in every respect. the one we chose works the best for the largest number of situations.

Ok, I admit I’ve never seen a solo model like this and I didn’t imagine that it had a use (although quite a niche use, I’d say…). But what about the (supposedly) vast majority of Ardour users, who use it as a multitrack audio recorder/sequencer/editor/mixer? Suppose you want to make sure you’ve edited a region correctly; what could you do? You should solo its track and mute all busses, or alternately solo the track, solo its effect bus and mute all other tracks routing to that bus, if you want the dry+wet sound (for example, if you want to test different kinds of reverb on a single track). Couldn’t you make an option to select a suitable solo model for every application? I’ve seen there’s already an option, but it really looks like it’s broken…