Weird Automation (?) Issue

I’ve got a vocal track that has suddenly started to mute itself at exactly the same point on every playthrough.

Automation is set to [R]ead, but the track contains no automation (I’ve deleted all track automation just to make sure).

If automation [R] is deactivated the problem does not occur - it only happens if [R] is active.

I’ve tried Duplicating the track but the problem still occurs on the duplicate track if [R] is active.

I’ve tried creating a new audio track and copying all the parts to the new track - same problem.

It’s as if there is an automation [Mute] happening, but there is no automation present at all!

I though it might me the Group track for the vocals but that contains no automation and the vocal double track does not get muted.

Any idea how I might overcome this?

It gets worse.

The problem is happening on other tracks in the same project where there are no automation Mutes.

I’ve now deleted ALL automation from the project and the problem has gone away.

The only thing that is (for me) out of the ordinary was that yesterday I used Automation [Trim] to reduce the overall levels of several tracks in the project. The problem started after that.

Is it possible that using [Trim] messes up the Mute automation?

Has anyone experienced anything similar?

I’m not sure I’ve had those exact symptoms.

I would save-as and then delete all channels that are unrelated to one of the tracks that are giving problems. So I’d save the groups and outputs that the track outputs to of course.

Then I’d try ‘show used automation’ or whatever it’s called and double-check there is neither mute automation nor level automation. I would also double-check your routing. Perhaps set your meters to read ‘input’ and see if you get any signal on the audio tracks meter when you do that. If you don’t, then it’s not even reading from disk it seems. If you get signal, but not when you switch to post-fader/panner and you get no signal at the next stage (group or output) then the problem is probably on the track. I would then maybe look at having accidentally messed up a plugin’s input or output or something like that.

Last thing I can think of is if you accidentally clicked on a direct routing path or something like that and by doing so simply turned the output off or something…

I’ve checked all the routing and there don’t appear to be any issues there.

Today I’ve rewritten all the automation from scratch after first deleting all automation from the project. There have been no similar issues this time. It might, or might not, be significant that I have not used [Trim] at all today. This could be a red herring but there’s definitely something fishy going on.