I am not convinced that a button which somehow stops the audio engine is more elegant than having an empty rackspace with a huge text on it saying “PAUSE” or “BREAK”.
The less you have to worry about on the stage - the better. There is no benefit of having an on/off switch.
When I step back up on the stage I can just press my foot controller and start playing. I don’t have to switch something on.
If there was such a button - one might forget that it’s off, step up, the song starts and you play your bit but no sound is coming out. By the time you figure out that you have to switch on your audio engine - the damage is done.
Many professional microphones don’t have an off switch. You don’t want to start singing before you realize that you (or someone else) switched it off.
I guess - I do not understand the benefit of having such an extra button, but I can see drawbacks immediately. As I often say - I’ve been wrong before so it is absolutely possible that I am missing something.
Actually, the problem I have is that it’s not at all obvious to me why it’s necessary to be able to turn off the audio engine at all. It’s not like the computer is going to die or start complaining.
So wearing different hats, I have different answers to this
As a developer, every feature takes time to develop and test and that’s time taken away from implementing other stuff that people want so we need to understand why (for example) turning the audio engine off is necessary and why it should be higher priority than other stuff on our list
As a daily user of this software myself (I play in three bands and try rehearse pretty much every day), I haven’t yet found a reason for why I would want to turn off the audio engine, other than (as some have noted) momentarily in a “panic” situation, (which has rarely happened to me). When I’m done rehearsing, I just go do something else and come back, sometimes the next day - with everything left up and running. Somehow, this notion of turning off the audio engine seems like some kind of legacy thing where maybe it used to be necessary.
I’ve looked at some of the other competing products out there. Some of them have the ability to turn off the audio engine, others don’t. Doesn’t seem like a “must have” to me, particularly since one can just switch to an empty rackspace.
It’s not a risky move. As I mentioned earlier - you can really unplug your audio interface from your computer while GP is running. It will tell you what happened and ask you to plug it back in.
Once you do - things are back to normal
Should work every time with no exceptions.
Do you want to do it during your gig - questionable
Oh yes I cannot agree more, I had such an issue for years, just after the break of a fashion show. I soloed one channel by mistake and couldn’t hear something when playing. It took me minutes to figure out what was wrong even if it was really stupid.
I personally don’t want to have a checklist with things to do before being able to play.
It should be so for any other microphones too, so people would stop to play with microphones to find a non existing switch and stop to say stupid words to check if the microphone works fine when it is not from their responsibility. I could kill when I see this
And this is really great, because with my old version of Cantabile, even if it has a audio engine switch, it kills Cantabile.
OK, there is a better way to reduce the CPU power and to save the planet, it is (perhaps) to play acoustic instruments … but we all like what we can do with plugins
Thanks for the discussion everyone, nice to hear different points of view
A couple of things:
I don’t have a serious use-case for wanting to do this. It was just something I do while taking a break from practicing, which at the moment is 100% of my time with GP (practicing I mean, not taking breaks :).
I’ve realised that what I was proposing was something to help when NOT using GP, which now seems crazy! I’ll return my focus to things related to actually using GP
… but we all like what we can do with plugins 
