"Ghost" waveform

[Dr.Gerry]

Hi All, I wasn't sure if I should post this in the General Discussion forum or this particular forum, so apologies if this is the wrong place for this question.

I was wondering if there is any way to show a 'ghost' waveform when multiple tracks are sent to a bus. What I mean is : I am working on a track that has 10 guitars, all of which have 4 mics. Rather than have 40 guitar mixer strips cluttering up my window, I inserted a bus after each guitar's 4 strips, and then hid the individual strips, so in my window, rather than having a strip for each of "Guitar01Mic1, Guitar01Mic2, Guitar01Mic3, Guitar01Mic4" repeated 10 times I now just have 'Guitar1, Guitar2' etc. The only problem is that it's really helpful to be able to see the wave display for each guitar in the editor as most of them are only small bits that play at various times during the track.

I know I could probably give each track a descriptive name, like "intro", "bit before the chorus", "squeaky bit just after chorus", "chunka chunka bit before bridge" etc, but there's not a whole lot of room for track names.....and I'm not real good at descriptive names!! If there was some way of showing the waveform for the bus track in the editor, that would be really handy. Hopefully there is such a feature and I just haven't found it - as well as not being good with descriptive names, I'm also not fantastic at observing things!

[johndev]

I don't think it's possible but hopefully somebody will come along and correct me.

A workaround would be to use a track instead of a bus.
1) Connect the outputs of the source tracks to the input of this 'bus track' (because tracks can't be targets for aux sends).
2) Set the playlist of the 'bus track' to Share one of the source tracks - this results in the waveform being shown on the 'bus track'.
3) On the 'bus track', turn on "In" and turn off "Disk", so it only plays the source tracks' audio and not the playlist's audio.

I gave it a quick go and it seems to work but it's a pretty ugly workaround and - again, somebody correct me if I'm wrong here - a bad way to do it because direct routing (step 1) isn't latency compensated so it might result in timing problems. I.e. The 'bus track' audio out of sync with everything else.

I'd like a ghost waveform too. I use busses a lot and often like to hide their source tracks because I generally don't need to see them. But I would like to see where they're making sound.

I imagine that bus waveforms would be tricky to implement. To show what they're actually 'playing' it would need to take into account not just the source track waveforms but also any fader, pan and mute operations on those sources (including automated), not to mention other processing (FX, EQ). And at any time you could send a new source to the bus, or remove a send. I.e. The waveform would need to be rebuilt any time any change is made to any of the sources, or any change in what the sources are.

[Dr.Gerry]

Thanks Johndev. You're right about it sounding like an ugly workaround, but it's a workaround, so thanks for taking the time to reply. What I have been doing sometimes (when I REALLY need to see the waveform) is just turning one of the 4 tracks back on for a short while, but it's not uncommon for me to then get a bit confused and fiddle with that track rather than the bus it is being sent to. It seems that it is quite easy to confuse myself these days.....just one of the many 'benefits' of advancing years!