Maschine Muting.. Have I gone mad?

Lionzinio
Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor

Mute should be an easy, obvious concept. I choose to mute something (a group, a sound, a pattern) I should stop hearing it.

Instead Mute is not working in the way I imagine.

I've created a pattern with 4 stems from a track. I want to play them and Mute or Solo them as necessary.

However, when I use Mute, it doesn't mute the track, I continue to hear it, I just get some weird colour change in my mixer. Neither Mute nor Solo stops the individual samples from playing through the group and master outputs

This just seems wrong.

These pics clearly show muted tracks outputting sound

What is actually going on here?

Best Answer

  • Lionzinio
    Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor
    Answer ✓

    So, yes, in some ways I have gone mad. Mad as in really annoyed that Maschine doesn't bother to function in the same way every other audio system seems to.

    I assumed that muting something in Maschine works like muting it anywhere else. ie Mute immediately suppresses all the audio output from that Pad, Group, Channel, Whatever. Because, after all, that's what 'Mute' actually means. So I have a group that is making sounds and I mute it, that sound is suppressed and not heard. Similarly with sounds in groups. So when I am playing a pattern and I mute a sound, that sound is suppressed and is no longer heard (irrespective of whether it continues to 'make noise' in the background).

    Maschine 3.0 simply doesn't work like this.

    Group muting works as expected. But now Sound muting only functions properly if you have each individual sound actively turned to Audio Mute. Otherwise muting a Sound has no effect if that sound is currently playing. And that sound is not muted.

    I find this really weird. And I find the lack of any way that I can set this on a system or project level to be pretty rubbish.

    It means that in order to do what the NI demo on Youtube suggests you can with stems requires you to reset this parameter on all four stems separately (as well as introduce some way to trigger them). And just for added pita levels, you can't select multiple sounds that you want to do this with. You have to do them one by one. Just to get your sounds to behave in the way you expect them to because that's how it works in every single other audio system.

    This is not a good thing and should be addressed as a matter of priority.

Answers

  • RafaelsTracks
    RafaelsTracks Member Posts: 28 Member

    Try Sound > Output > Audio Mute → On

  • Lionzinio
    Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor

    Nope that doesn't do anything at all.

    Mute should work by me holding down the Mute button on the controller and selecting what I want to mute and having it be muted.

  • darkwaves
    darkwaves Member Posts: 433 Guru

    Maschine mutes midi triggers by default. You have a single trigger. If you mute a pad after it starts playing; the audio will continue. That might not be what you want, but it's how maschine works. Audio mute should do what you're expecting. Enable it and then mute the pad.

    This isn't new. Maschine has always worked this way (at least maschine 2; not sure about maschine 1)

  • D-One
    D-One Moderator Posts: 3,579 mod
    edited November 6

    Muting Pad/Groups from the controller and (the new) muting MIDI events in the Piano Roll are different things.

    Muting from the controller relies on the option mentioned by @RafaelsTracks, if Audio Mute is not enabled then it wont mute a Sampler that is already Playing, it will just mute when the next MIDI notes are triggered. Both behaviours can be desirable, so you have the option.

    MIDI muting on the Piano Roll / Pattern Editor apparently does not mute immediately even with Audio Mute ON, so it doesn't stop a Sampler that has already been triggered.

  • tetsuneko
    tetsuneko Member Posts: 797 Expert

    I much prefer the way mutes work in Maschine compared to how they work in Ableton. You can mute "trigless" sounds with the mixer faders or lock states

  • Lionzinio
    Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor
    Answer ✓

    So, yes, in some ways I have gone mad. Mad as in really annoyed that Maschine doesn't bother to function in the same way every other audio system seems to.

    I assumed that muting something in Maschine works like muting it anywhere else. ie Mute immediately suppresses all the audio output from that Pad, Group, Channel, Whatever. Because, after all, that's what 'Mute' actually means. So I have a group that is making sounds and I mute it, that sound is suppressed and not heard. Similarly with sounds in groups. So when I am playing a pattern and I mute a sound, that sound is suppressed and is no longer heard (irrespective of whether it continues to 'make noise' in the background).

    Maschine 3.0 simply doesn't work like this.

    Group muting works as expected. But now Sound muting only functions properly if you have each individual sound actively turned to Audio Mute. Otherwise muting a Sound has no effect if that sound is currently playing. And that sound is not muted.

    I find this really weird. And I find the lack of any way that I can set this on a system or project level to be pretty rubbish.

    It means that in order to do what the NI demo on Youtube suggests you can with stems requires you to reset this parameter on all four stems separately (as well as introduce some way to trigger them). And just for added pita levels, you can't select multiple sounds that you want to do this with. You have to do them one by one. Just to get your sounds to behave in the way you expect them to because that's how it works in every single other audio system.

    This is not a good thing and should be addressed as a matter of priority.

  • tetsuneko
    tetsuneko Member Posts: 797 Expert

    perhaps loops should indeed have "Audio mute" as their default behaviour?

  • Lionzinio
    Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor

    I believe everything should have 'Audio Mute' on as a default (if indeed there is ever a case to have sounds behave without Mute working the way it does everywhere else).

    I simply don't believe that a sound should continue to play when I press Mute and select that sound. And I don't believe that there is a coherent argument for this to happen.

    So the default behaviour should be that muting every sound behaves the way it does everywhere else. I should not have to adjust every single sound individually just to get them to behave as expected.

  • tetsuneko
    tetsuneko Member Posts: 797 Expert
    edited November 7

    We will have to agree to disagree on that. MIDI level muting, as is the default behaviour on Maschine, is VITAL to my personal workflow, where I am jumping across patterns/scenes and muting/unmuting sounds/groups constantly. Without MIDI mutes, muting something like a drum hit would cut off the tail of the sound, which sounds very jarring during a performance if not timed absolutely perfectly (audio mute would also cut off any fx on the sound)

  • Lionzinio
    Lionzinio Member Posts: 128 Advisor

    I'm glad it works for you. And clearly there is a demand for it to work that way as well as what I would call a conventional way.

    This, however, is a really poor implementation of expected behaviours. The solution should be to give the individual user the choice as to which option was implemented on a programme preference level.

    That way I would be able to choose 'Always Mute Audio', while you'd be able to choose 'Don't Mute Audio'. And if there were individual instances we wanted to change, we could do that too.

  • D-One
    D-One Moderator Posts: 3,579 mod
    edited November 9

    It's poor implementation for you.

    For me it works as intended, I might not want a longer slice to be affected by mute immediately, but if I do then i enable the Audio Mute. This way with an option it can work the way you want and the way I want.

    Most drum-machines work this way so mutes don't cut off tails of snares and other oneshots, and Maschine is heavily inspired in those as a device.

    If it bothers you that much, then make a template I guess.

    I would agree that choosing a default behaviour in the preferences would be nice tho.

Back To Top