I’m trying to achieve a specific live playback workflow, and I’m wondering if there’s a better way to do it in AbleSet.
Instead of using +GUIDE and +LOOPGUIDE only for spoken guide cues, I’m using them to switch between two complete versions of my musical stems.
For example:
My normal drum, guitar, vocal and instrument stems are on tracks marked as +GUIDE.
Alternate stems (different fills, transitions, vocal arrangements, etc.) are on tracks marked as +LOOPGUIDE.
This works really well for repeated sections because AbleSet automatically switches between the normal and alternate arrangements.
The issue appears when I queue a section jump.
As soon as I queue the jump, AbleSet mutes both the +GUIDE and +LOOPGUIDE tracks. Since those tracks contain my actual musical stems, all of the audio disappears during the jump.
I also experimented with +JUMPGUIDE, but it doesn’t seem to solve the problem because it remains active all the time rather than only when a jump is queued, so it’s not suitable for switching complete stem tracks.
My question is:
Is there a recommended workflow for using alternate musical stems with section jumps, or are GUIDE tracks intended exclusively for guide cues?
I’m trying to build a playback system where repeated sections and section jumps can each have different musical arrangements, while keeping the transitions seamless.
Has anyone achieved something similar?
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Please fill out these values to make it easier to troubleshoot:
The flag you actually want here is +JUMPGUIDE. It’s muted by default and only unmutes while a section other than the one immediately following the current one is cued. In other words, only during a real section jump. Used together, the three flags cover every state cleanly:
+GUIDE → your normal arrangement (mutes during loops and jumps)
+LOOPGUIDE → your alternate arrangement for repeated/looped sections
+JUMPGUIDE → a dedicated arrangement that plays during a queued jump
That gives each state its own stems with no silent gap, which sounds like exactly the seamless system you’re after.
One thing though: you mentioned +JUMPGUIDE “remains active all the time” for you. That doesn’t match its documented behavior, so I’d love to pin down what’s happening. Could you tell me:
Which exact track(s) you put +JUMPGUIDE on (and the exact spelling — the flags are case-sensitive)?
What Jump Mode you’re using (Settings → Jump Mode)?
How you were testing it: were you cueing a section that’s not the next one in the song, or the immediately following one?
+JUMPGUIDE only kicks in for jumps to a non-adjacent section, so if you were testing with the next section it wouldn’t behave as expected.
I tried using the +JUMPGUIDE tags again, and this time it worked. Thank you, @agustinvolpe.
Ableset wasn’t identifying the track as +JUMPGUIDE, so I thought I was doing something wrong. However, after you confirmed that it was the correct path, I started over, and this time it worked.
So for my use case, we kind of have the opposite problem. We utilize timecode to automate propresenter lyrics. So we’ve been using the +GUIDE to disable timecode during looped sections, but when we jump to a different section it disables Timecode, but we need it to keep going through that section to keep lyrics running. Is there currently a way to disable a track during a loop, but keep it active during a jump?