Best workflow to show only tracks used in a specific scene/range (Audio Drama project)?

[Strom]

Hi everyone,

I’m currently working on a large audio drama project in Studio One and the session is getting pretty huge. I already have my tracks neatly organized into folders for dialogue, footsteps, SFX, atmospheres, music etc., and each group is routed through its own bus/group channel.

What I’m trying to achieve
Since the production has many different scenes, I’d love to have a cleaner way to only show the tracks that actually contain events for the scene I’m currently working on.

The complication:
Some tracks are used in multiple scenes (e.g. a recurring character’s voice track, or a global ambience bed). That’s why a tagging-based workflow (being able to assign multiple scenes/tags per track) would probably be the ideal solution – but I’m not sure if there’s a good way to do this natively in Studio One (I see it's possible with
Studio One Scoring Tools.)

What I’ve tried so far:
Using the “Show Tracks with Events in Loop range” function and manually placing the loop range around each scene. This works, but it quickly becomes too tiresome to keep setting the loop area every time I want to switch scenes.
Another approach I’ve considered is renaming tracks with scene prefixes, like S02-CharacterX or S01-FX-Door, so I can filter tracks by typing S02 in the track search.
This works quite well for tracks that appear in just one scene.
But as soon as a track appears in multiple scenes, the naming gets messy:
S01-S05-S14-S23-Footsteps_Corridor
It becomes too long, clunky and hard to maintain, especially with over 100 tracks and recurring characters or environments.

What I’d like to know

• Are there better workflows to show only the relevant tracks for a given scene?
• Is there any way to achieve a tagging-like system to manage tracks that appear in multiple scenes?
• Do you use Track Visibility Presets, folder nesting or filters for this kind of thing?

I’d really love to hear how you handle this type of session management, especially if you’ve worked on projects with lots of scene-specific tracks.

Thanks a lot in advance!
Lars.

 

[SwitchBack]

Interesting case. It would need some sort of “Show Tracks with Events between Markers” function. I sense a macro opportunity here...

 

[Lukas]

I recently produced two audiobooks, and the Track Tags feature turned out to be really useful. I added tags for each scene or chapter, which allowed me to quickly show or select only the tracks associated with a specific tag.

Another option is to create sections for the different scenes. Then you can simply select a section, press Shift+P (Loop Selection), and use Show Tracks with Events in Loop Range.

You could also combine both commands into a macro and assign it to a shortcut or a button in the toolbar.

Honestly, it doesn't get much easier than that.

You can also use mix scenes to change track visibility but I personally would prefer the sections or the track tag approach.

 

[Strom]

Thanks Lukas - I will try that sections macro