Solo Safe Mode - How to Disable It Forever and Ever?

Question

The little red line over the Solo button keeps reappearing, often without my notice, so when I go to bounce some other track, say, a kick, there's a ukelele, say, playing along. Is there some easy way to disable this "feature" of Logic Pro 8?

Answer 1

My apologies, one of the big problems with this forum is simply the very broad spectrum of user levels it covers. Those of us who've been using logic since days of yore are so familiar with the environment that it's just second nature to us. But in the last few releases Apple have been trying to minimise user interaction with it in order to make the program more user-friendly. I might add that I believe this to be a mistake as the environment is probably the most powerful MIDI programming tool of any DAW. But I digress.
The environment is an essential part of Logic's inner workings. Every track you work with on the arrange is assigned to an object in the environment. In the case of audio tracks they are assigned to audio objects. The channel strips you see in the mixer page are in fact slightly tweaked representations of these objects.
To access the environment, go to the window menu and select environment. It should by default come up with the mixer page. Each one of the channel strips in this window is an audio object. If you can't see one called 'prelisten' anywhere in the window then you need to create one. Select one of the audio objects by clicking on its label underneath (eg 'Audio 1'). Now hold down alt and drag it to an empty area to create a duplicate. With the duplicate still selected (it turns light grey) look in the inspector box on the left for a parameter called 'Channel'. Click to the right of this for the pull down menu. Select the submenu audio then scroll all the way down until you find audio 256. You have now created a new prelisten. But you will have to manually make it solo-safe now. Hold down control and click on the solo button.
I would also recommend you rename the new object as prelisten, by choosing the text tool from the toolbox in the upper right and clicking on the object label. Also I would suggest that with the object selected, you uncheck the box on the left next to the parameter 'icon'. This makes it impossible to access the object from the arrange window, which should prevent any accidental deletion in the future. I have no idea why apple didn't take this last step in the first place.
Hope that all made sense. Good luck with your first foray into the environment!