Group tracks, mute, and solo

Five narration clips usually want one set of effects, one fader, and one mute — not five copies that drift apart as you edit. A group gives them that: its members sum through a single bus, and the bus carries the group’s own volume, effects, and automation.

​

When to use a group

• Narration in several clips. One rack for the whole voice, and one thing for a carve to point at.
• More than a couple of sound effects. One place to turn all of them down is worth more than precise individual levels you will never revisit.
• Anything you want to mute as a unit — an ambience layer, a music stem.

A single clip does not need a group. Its own rack is already one place.

​

Create a group

On an audio track holding more than one ungrouped clip, the FX button offers to group them first: it reads “Group these clips to add effects to all of them”. Choose Group. Studio creates a group behind those clips and points anything that needed it — a carve, for instance — at the group rather than at the individual clip ids.

​

Read a group row

A group gets its own timeline row, carrying: The caret and the ∿ toggle are independent: showing a group’s members does not open their automation lanes, and opening the group’s lanes does not expand its members. A group-level effect hears the sum of its members, not each one separately. That is the point of a bus — one compressor across a whole voiceover behaves differently from five compressors on five clips, and usually better.

​

Mute and solo are not symmetric

This is the part worth remembering: So mute is a mix decision and solo is a listening tool. You can leave a solo active, render, and get the full mix — which is deliberate, because a forgotten solo silently shipping a one-track export would be much worse. A group that is not soloed while one of its members is appears half-lit: the display-only signal that some of what is under it still plays.

​

Membership lives on the member

Worth knowing because it explains most surprises: each clip records which group it belongs to, rather than the group listing its members. Delete a clip and it simply disappears from the group; nothing dangles. Groups are audio only and do not nest. A group marker on a video clip is ignored.

​

What should happen

• The group row appears with the members collapsed beneath it, and the grouping offer disappears from that track’s FX button.
• Effects added to the group apply to everything under it at once.
• Muting the group silences all members, in preview and in the render.

​

Common problems

The group’s effects do nothing. Check that the members actually carry the group, rather than that the group appears to list them. Nothing happened when I grouped clips. Grouping resolves the clips it was given against the timeline’s current rows. If the track is collapsed, or its clips live inside a nested composition, expand it and try again. Clips inside a nested composition are not offered grouping. They arrive as separate rows rather than as one track holding several clips, so the grouping offer does not appear. Group them in the composition that owns them. A soloed track was missing from the export. It was not — solo cannot affect a render. Look for a mute.

​

Related topics

• Make music sit under narration
• Automate a parameter over time
• Audio effects implementation