Can you mute an entire track in FCPX?

No, i appreciate your trying to help. Thanks.

Thanks, but this doesn't work. The clips are not able to be maintained on one line, or track, since FCPX doesn't allow me to keep them all in line. As such, I could only do what you suggest by manually going through the entire project and selecting each and every clip. Once I do that, yes, I can compound them as you say, but then I want to work with those clips again and so I have to un-compound them all. Then, when I want to turn them off again, I have to again manually go and carefully select each and every clip. Might be fifty clips. Might be more. That's really, really tedious compared to all the clips being on one track which I can maintain for editing, but quickly disable as I need. I wondered if FCPX allows me to place audio clips in a track which is maintained in one straight line, like the old FCP (or like Logic or any sound editing app), so that I could easily turn that entire track off or on.

Thanks, but I think you're missing my point here. Easy enough to do with three clips, but if you have fifty or more clips on a half hour project, all over the place, it takes quite some time to select all those clips manually, compound them and then disable them. After that, if you want to edit, you need to undo the compounding and do it all again when you want to disable. That's compared to being able to keep all those clips on one track and switching that track off and on with one click.

In my case, it might be that I have a film with narration throughout and I want to play it once without any narration, so I want to quickly turn off all of the narration, but nothing else.

Aha! This is very interesting, but I'm having a hard time getting it to work. Found this very useful article about it: http://finalcutwhiz.com/tutorials/roles-in-fcpx/

Following that, I created a new sub role in dialogue called Alt Takes. This way, I could lay up a bunch of alt audio takes and having assigned them, can easily turn them on and off, but only thing is, I'm not seeing the Alt Takes role listed in the Roles Tab. I added it, the clip is assigned it, but it doesn't appear in the window you have shown. Are you able to create a sub role, or a new role that shows as it does in that link I included?

Actually, I figured it out. It doesn't appear in the window until after you assign the new role to a clip, then it appears. You can access the roles from the Modify menu as well.

Thanks Andy, for finding this fix. It's huge! I want to mark your comment as "solved" but I already marked it as helpful, so please repeat the instruction and I will mark that as solved.

Cheers, David

Just discovered an annoying update to this issue. When I output the project, the settings in roles are ignored and everything plays, even if a role is turned off, so I get tracks included in the output that were meant to be silent. This means roles works fine when working on a project, but the feature disappears on output. Bizarre and annoying.

Very interesting. So this roles thing isn't quite what I was hoping, but almost. In simple terms, if I turn the role off, and I don't hear it, or see it, as the case may be, then I would fully expect that decision to be respected by FCPX and not enabled by itself depending on the output method. That is really bizarre. If I want to use the Sharing option to make an Ipad compatible version (which I often do becasue it's a quick and easy way to get an output at the desired resolution), I can't do that if I have roles in play.

So in that sense, Roles doesn't really work. I also don't really understand the options presented to me in the Export dialogue for Roles. I guess I could try all four to figure it out. All I want is to render a file as I would expect it to be done based on what I am viewing when I am editing. I wonder which option that would be? Still don't get why roles only output properly there. I mean, just out of curiousity, why the heck would Apple make it work in this confusing way?

Sorry, not meaning to rent, Andy. You've been incredibly helpful and I thank you for it.