# Soloing Tracks

"Soloing" a track refers to changing some aspect of the signal flow through Ardour that makes it possible to listen to one (or just a few) tracks at a time. It is often done during mixing and mastering to help an audio engineer listen carefully to parts of the mix.

Tracks may be soloed at any time. When one or more tracks are soloed, all non-soloedntracks will no longer be audible.

Soloing tracks does not affect the solo status of busses, nor vice versa. That is, soloing a track leaves all busses audible and soloing a track leaves all tracks "audible". You may not actually be able to hear the "audible" material if it is routed through a non-soloed bus.

This design is intended to allow FX busses and master outs to be useful even when soloing. Soloing is made significantly more complex by the presence of control outs (see control_outs_soloing for more details on soloing with control outs).

## Rude Solo Light

Whenever one or more tracks are soloed, the "rude solo light" in the transport window will flash. You can cancel any current solos by clicking on the "rude solo light".

## Solo modes

Ardour has two solo modes.

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solo latch

  soloing a track adds it to the set of soloed tracks, so you may have any number of soloed tracks.

solo unlatch

  soloing a track unsolos any other soloed track, so you can have only one soloed track at a time.

## Changing Solo Mode

To change the solo mode, goto the Options editor (options_editor) and view the Misc tab.

## Soloing a Track

To toggle the solo state of a track, click on the solo button in either the mixer strip for the track or the track controls section in the editor.

To toggle the solo state of all tracks in an edit or mix group, use Ctrl1 on the solo button of a track in the group. If you do this in the Editor, the edit group will be used; in the Mixer, the mix group will be used.

To toggle the solo state of all tracks, use CtrlShift Button1 on a track solo button.

## Solo safe

To protect a track's current solo status, use Shift1 on that track's solo button. The color of the button will change to a pale blue to indicate "solo safe" status. No changes to the solo state for that track are possible until "solo safe" has been unset for the track.

## Momentary solo

Use 2 on a track's solo button to solo the track for as long as the mouse button is pressed.