Never let your mic feed back through the monitors again.
Auto-Master-Mute is a small free extension for Fender Studio Pro. While at least one audio track is record-armed, it mutes the Main bus automatically — and unmutes it the moment nothing is armed any more. Your headphone outputs are never touched, so you keep monitoring while you record.
Free · Fender Studio Pro 8 (may work on earlier Studio One versions — untested) · macOS & Windows.
Not an official Fender Studio extension. An independent hobby
project — I am not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Fender
in any way.
Features
Mutes the Main bus while you record
Arm an audio track and the Main bus goes quiet — the speakers your microphone can hear. Disarm it and the Main bus opens again. Nothing to remember, nothing to click mid-take.
Headphones stay open
Only the Main bus is touched. Separate headphone and cue outputs keep playing, so you and the performer hear everything while the room stays silent.
Audio tracks only
Instrument and MIDI tracks never trigger it. Arming a soft synth to play in a part leaves your monitoring exactly as it was.
Blink feedback instead of dialogs
Toggling the protection doesn't open a dialog you have to click away. The new state is signalled on the Main bus itself: two short dips for on, one long dip for off. You hear and see it without leaving the keyboard.
Safety block while a track is armed
Flipping the protection while a track is still hot is refused outright — a dialog explains why and nothing changes. Disarm first, then toggle. It is the one place a dialog actually earns its click.
Your own mutes are respected
A Main mute you set by hand is left alone: the script only clears a mute it set itself, and the blink restores whatever state it found. On shutdown it cleans up after itself, so you never inherit a silent Main bus.
Costs nothing while it runs
The scripting API has no callback for record-arm changes, so the service polls twice a second — on the UI thread, never the audio thread. It cannot cause dropouts or clicks at any buffer size. Switched off, it does no work at all.
Installation
- 1Quit Studio Pro. Extensions are only scanned at startup.
- 2Unzip the download and copy the
padbangers.automutefolder into your Extensions directory:
macOS:~/Library/Application Support/Fender/Studio Pro 8/Extensions/
Windows:%APPDATA%\Fender\Studio Pro 8\Extensions\ - 3Start Studio Pro and assign the command Toggle Auto-Master-Mute (category Padbangers) to a keyboard shortcut or a macro toolbar button.
- 4Switch the protection on before you arm a track. It starts off after every launch — deliberately, so you always know its state.
The extension is unsigned, so drag & drop onto the Studio Pro window will most likely be rejected — copy the folder manually as described above. Full instructions are in the README inside the ZIP.
Download
Free. Public domain — do whatever you want.
This is not an official Fender Studio extension and I am not affiliated with or endorsed by Fender. It is built on an undocumented internal API and manipulates your Main bus mute state during recording — test it on an empty song before trusting it in a real session. No warranty.
Changelog
v1.1.0
- Feature Blink feedback instead of dialogs — toggling signals the new state by dipping the Main bus mute: two short dips for on, one long dip for off. No click needed.
- Feature Safety block while a track is armed — toggling with an audio track still record-armed is refused, with a dialog explaining why. Switch the protection on before arming.
- Change Command moved to the
Padbangerscategory (wasAuto-Mute). This clears any keyboard shortcut or toolbar button you had assigned — reassign it once after updating. - Change Renamed to Auto-Master-Mute. The package ID is unchanged, so it updates an existing install in place.
v1.0.0
- Feature Initial release — background service that mutes the Main bus while an audio track is record-armed, plus a toggle command to switch the protection off for non-microphone recording.
Built against the community-maintained Studio Pro Scripting API Reference, which is itself entirely community-derived and incomplete. A future Studio Pro update may break this extension without warning. Requires a licensed installation of Fender Studio Pro. Vibe coded with Claude.
Fender and Fender Studio are trademarks of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. PreSonus and Studio One are trademarks of PreSonus Audio Electronics, Inc. This is an independent, unofficial project — not a Fender Studio extension, and neither it nor I am affiliated with, endorsed by, or otherwise connected to Fender or PreSonus.