Today I ran into an issue that I hadn't been confronted with before - maybe someone here knows the fix...

My standard timeline audio track allocation is as follows -

A1 Sync (mono)
A2 Sync (mono)
A3 VO (stereo)
A4 M&E 1 (stereo)
A5 M&E 2 (stereo)
A6 FX 1 (stereo)
A7 FX 2 (stereo)
A8 Wild (mono)

This configuration automatically maps these tracks to the corresponding fader numbers on the Artist Mix panel for manual control.

I'm cutting a film that will subsequently have a voiceover on Track A3 - but until today the track was empty. I had to edit a complicated effects sequence for which I needed to make a guide voiceover to get the FX timing right. Once I had recorded the guide, I noticed that on this timeline the A3 VO track was mono, not Stereo as required (I don't know why, this is not my usual configuration for A3)

So to correct this I simply created a new stereo audio track, deleted the original mono A3 VO track and renamed the new audio track as A3 VO (stereo), moving it up to the required numerical position using Ctrl and mouse drag. Then I laid the guide VO clip.

All well a good - on the timeline. But when I came to mix, I discovered that the new audio track that I consider to be A3, is actually patched to A8 on the artist panel, which invokes a paging of the channels to access the track. In other words, the relationship between MC audio track numbers and Artist tracks is defined internally in MC by the actual MC track numbers at the time they were created.

I can of course patch the track in the Artist Mix configuration tool, but tis is only a cosmetic correction, it does nothing to change the basic relationship between MC and Artist Mix.

Is there any way, within the MC domain, to "patch" the MC audio tracks to specific channel numbers, so that a newly created track 3 can take the place of a now deleted track 3 (for example) and still be recognixed and controleld as A3 by Artist?

Had I seen this issue when I began to edit this a week ago, I would simply have juggled, deleted and renamed the tracks to ensure the correct relationship between MC and Artist - not a difficult problem when the tracks are all empty. But now the only way I can preserve the relationship is to rename A3 to A8 and mo9ve it down on the timeline into A8 position - a perfect relationship between MC and Artist but a dumb relationship between editor (me) and MC :)

I could manually move and rename all the edited clips to new track numbers but for an almost edited 30 minute documentary this is a big job.

The question is - can I intervene in what MC internally calls A3 when talking to Artist rather than intervening in what Artist interprets positionally as A3?

Or can one alter an existing mono audio track to be stereo so as not to confuse the internal track patching by creating new tracks and deleting old ones?

Happy Easter folks...

Alt-Cmd-U (Mac) or Alt-Ctrl-U (PC) will allow u to you to specify the track number for any newly created track. Track names can be numbers but they won't change the actual track number.

So I would do the above and create a new proper A3.

Another way of saying what Job said is that merely moving a track to what seems like A3 does not make it A3 as avid sees it.  Doing what Job says truly would make is A3.

Jef

Thanks Job! That was a command I hadn't discovered before (who knows how many golden secret commands are hidden in MC?)

Before I read your mail I had to do some experimenting. I opebned a new sequence and deleted all audio tracks. Then created them one at a time and could see thta MC was mapping the wrong track numbers to some of the Artist tracks. A1 and A2 were OK, but A3 was A4 according to Artist, and so on up to A8, which now was called A10+ on Artist. Curious? Especiually for a new timeline with all audio tracks deleted - one would assume that MC would start upwards incrementally?

So I tried another trick. I opened a old project in which I didn't have this problem. Here I created a new sequence with the desired track configuration confirming conformaty between MC and Artist Mix - and saved it in a separate bin. Closed MC and then copied the new bi with the new sequence over the my current project - then re-opened the project and voila! The sequence was OK and conformed between Artist Mix and MC. A long workaround but it confirmed my suspicion that the track relationship is stored within that track in the project. How the current project/seqwuence got corrupted i have no idea.

Then I used your recipe to correct the existing timeline sequence thta has the fault. All OK now. Thanks!

I'm quite sure that what you did just reset the timeline view (in a somewhat convoluted way). Your original timeline view settngs probably had some tracks dragged out of order. As much as that is possible in MC, it does not change the track number.