Mute Container Feature

In my humble opinion, 'mute' should only apply to the sounds of the instruments in the container.  What I believe you're talking about here is a temporary 'delete' which should not be confused with 'mute'.

My own experience is that I often want to solo a container, but only for the instruments that contain actual figures.  This can be achieved by CTRL-clicking the solo button for the relevant instruments, but I have often thought a 'solo container' button would be nice.  I guess this idea could also be used for 'mute container', and that is what I thought you were talking about when I first saw this topic.

Anyway, I personally think you should be careful with the terminology, but it's a great idea!

From the perspective of the rendering process, a muted container would simply no longer be there. Like you were dragging it aside outside the arrangement. This would affect all parameters set in the container, including Harmony, Tempo, Scheme etc. 

This would be exactly also my understanding of a muted container: All Parameters of that container would be deactivated. It would have nothing to do with muting instruments. If the term "muting" causes confusion, the containers maybe could be called "active/inactive" or "active/passive". 

The most obvious application of that feature would be to place different versions of a container at a certain point of the arrangement and to perform A/B comparisons. 

If this muting/demuting feature would also work while the arrangement runs in a loop, some further fields of application would arise: Imagine, you put a base texture into the root container, say 4 or 8 bars and that this 4 or 8 bars are played in a loop. Then imagine further that this root container is surrounded by various other containers that perform different types of modifications. Containers that mute/demute instruments, that changes the harmony, changes figures, changes rhythmical structures, changes volume or panorama settings, effect settings, whatever. If you have prepared your arrangement in this way, you can then play the loop and build up your song live while the loop is running, simply by successively muting/demuting different combinations of containers. Similar to an improvisation with the "Scenes" in Ableton Live or in Steinberg's Loop Mash.

I think, at least for some types of songs, such as Progressive House tracks, that would be a quite attractive workflow. 

Hi

I think it should be a priority to make available the tool of mute notes (that all famous DAWs have) and after the mute containers.

I know that Synfire has the Pause option but this is an automation tool and when it applies visually the notes are not affected (as in Ableton does) and it is applied to a range of notes ,is not possible to apply to a selection of interspersed notes.

In Ableton there is a shortcut (0) ,you select the note-s and apply it and the note-s selected become grey and you can see what are muted.Is very simple and effective.

Cheers

For me also used as learning tool ( bypass a container ) of how someone has made his arrangement when there containers used on top of a rootcontainer.
Playing with a example arrangement means for me then..listen first to the rootcontainer.. and then build the arrangement gradually up... and listen step by step to the result. 
More uses for a bypass container too !

I think it should be a priority to make available the tool of mute notes (that all famous DAWs have) and after the mute containers.

I think we mean 'mute phrase?'

But, yes. I have been requesting this for years. It is an essential tool. Of course, 'mute container' is also important.

I assumed mute container would work as youve described andre and am happy with that. However I am greedy, never satisfied and know you are such an excellent programmer with nothing else to do ;) so Id like the following:

Mute container which works as you describe

Control/cmd click on a parameter 'led' eg figure, harmony, transpose, etc and have just that parameter disabled/enabled (ie toggle) for the container. Optionally muting the container/unmuting the container would disable/enable all the parameters for that container so you could turn everything off then turn things on one parameter at a time (or the reverse).

A way of disabling individual notes or phrases, maybe also an extra parameter 'probability' that would affect which notes play on a random basis (great for giving drums some life and movement and only mentioned as it is related to the muting of notes)

thanks

Most important aspect of "mute containers" is that it will give me the "fake"-ability of mutegroups.

Also it would make "takes" possible and variations in automation-runs, which is *really* useful.

Couldnt care less about muting single notes or whatever.

Couldnt care less about muting single notes or whatever.

That sounds a bit disrespectful to the wishes of other users to me.  Just because you don't want it doesn't mean it may not be useful to anyone else.  However, that is not really what this topic is about.

I still stand by my original statement that 'mute' is the wrong terminology for this excellent idea.  Mute does not mean change the tempo, time signature, etc.  I think a much better term for it (as Juergen alluded to) is 'inactivate container'.  That phrase just about covers everything that is intended, in my opinion.

I think a much better term for it (as Juergen alluded to) is 'inactivate container'. 

Pete ... I'm with you. But I think the simpler term is 'deactivate.'

That would be other than 'mute,' the way I would understand it. 'Deactivate' is what Andre describes. 'Mute' is simply leaving a phrase in place, but making non-operational.

The advantage of that is that one can then change small portions of the voice, but be able to rapidly reimplement those phrases later.

Mute means 'voiceless.' Andre's concept goes far beyond that to also disable other aspects of the program viz. the deactivated (but still present) container.

I think muting of sybols/notes is just as usefull !

Hi

Petearch :  

Couldnt care less about muting single notes or whatever.

That sounds a bit disrespectful to the wishes of other users to me.  Just because you don't want it doesn't mean it may not be useful to anyone else

Your answer is my answer , deeply  agree ;)

For me is very very useful the mute tool in all its concepts & applications : notes,symbols,containers...

more functions,more diversity, more likely to enrich

In my pictures examples i have an original melody and by the mute tool option you can get variations of the original melody without the need of erase any note of the original melody.

In any time you can enable or disable any note and get another variation of the melody.

In Synfire with the pause tool is very complicated to do this and more with complicated melodies.

Yes,you can in synfire to copy the original phrase several times and erase the notes that you want and get the same result but is not as fast and simple as with ableton´s mute tool.

Cheers

the simpler term is 'deactivate.'

Yes, that's it :)

the simpler term is 'deactivate.'

Yes, that's it 

Janamdo mentioned the term "bypass". Wouldn't that be good? 

And yes, to have a feature for muting individual notes would also be nice. In addition, it would be nice to have a feature that makes it possible to attach ornaments (such as trills, grace notes, appogiatura) to individual notes. But that's a different thing.

Hi

Juergen; I am agree with you,attach ornaments are wonderfull  +1

& With the mute notes would be necessary to consider two important things in Synfire:

(The mute notes would be like dead notes that they can resurrect at any time subject to your will)

1-If you mute a note-s in a phrase the harmony  should not consider them

2-If you mute a note-s in a phrase when you drag it to a DAW as a midi they should not be dragged or if you export that phrase as a midi file they should not be exported

Cheers

the simpler term is 'deactivate.'

Yes, that's it 

Janamdo mentioned the term "bypass". Wouldn't that be good? 

Yes, that could work as well. 'Bypass' is routinely used when an effects (FX) plugin in a chain is turned off or disabled.

But given that 'deactivating' a container would have more changes than simply altering the sound, I prefef 'deactivate' to 'bypass' for this use.

To reiterate, what Andre initially describes I would not call mute, I would call deactivate.

The other idea expressed here, to disable a phrase while leaving it in the container, I would call mute.

I agree with Juergen.... and let's just call it 'mute container'...and it should mute the container.. if there is a part playing,, it should be muted too..

We need to start agreeing on conventions of working.. That is one reason why SF is confusing.   There are a number of ways to accomplish the same thing.. While there may be a few ways to accomplish the same thing.. We should start to agree on a general practise.. One of course is free to work in another manner.. but we need starting conventions, terms that are universal to people.. When you start giving functions esoteric, specialized meanings..  it's just gonna bog down people who daydreamed when they read page 122 paragraph 4.. The more universal one can make it, the easier it is going to be for people to grasp... Look at all the languages we have.. yet there are basically a similar number of vowels, etc. 

You can always have more containers, Creating a container that is doing 5 different things, and then another doing another 5 makes it too confusing to figure out what is happening. 

I agree with Juergen.... and let's just call it 'mute container'...and it should mute the container.. if there is a part playing,, it should be muted too..

Well, I'm not quite sure if we really have a common understanding here.

If a container contains a phrase for a specific instrument, say Piano, and that container is muted, that would not necessarily mean that the the Piano is muted too. It would depend on the arrangement. Equally, it may be that then a piano phrase of another container is put into effect what would have the consequence that the piano would actually continue playing.

Would it also not be interesting to mute parts of a phrase ?

So how do you actually do this?  I have a use for it, remembered the discussion, found this thread, searched the cognitone support site and saw it was implemented in 1.7.10 but I can't see where you do it.

It's not in the Container menu, and it doesn't appear on right-click of a container. It's also not in the manual.

So how do you do it?

Apologies, I found it.  It's in the Container menu and it's called 'Inactive'.