Now in Beta: New Preference to Control Automatic Track Creation on the Timeline

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
March 13, 2026
2 replies
149 views

Editors have long expressed that automatic track creation can disrupt their editorial flow because it can upset intentional track setups, in particular when the source has more audio channels than the editing sequence. This new preference allows you to stay in control of your timeline and keep your tracks organized.

Now you can go into Settings/Preferences → Timeline → Turn off “Add tracks automatically when editing source clips into the Timeline.”

This update directly addresses the feature request here:

Thanks to everyone who took the time to share feedback and use cases -- your input helped shape this improvement. Please try it out and let us know if you see any issues.

Settings: Uncheck “Add tracks automatically when editing source clips into the Timeline”

Preference on

This screenshot shows what happens when the preference is on. When you drag a track with ten audio channels into a sequence with four audio channels, it automatically creates them.

Preference off (new)

This screenshot shows what happens when the preference is off. When you drag a track with ten audio channels into a sequence with four audio channels, it maintains the limit of four audio channels.

BrianLevin

Known Participant

Yes but with a caveat! In addition to it being annoying that tracks are automatically, unwanted, created upon cutting into a timeline, it’s also ideal to see the tracks that are going to be added because we may desire to add channels A6, A8, A10 but not the others, despite the sequence only have tracks as high as A4. So seeing a ghosting of tracks that are going to be cut in would be a plus to add to this very helpful adjustment.

S

ScottSimmons

Community Expert

Personally, I don’t care to see ghosted tracks or anything like that. While that is non-destructive that can still change the timeline, even if briefly, to show me the ghosting. But I do see how that can be useful. Honestly, at this point, it took so long to get this tiny update I’ll take the win and move on.

Shebbe

Community Expert

I do agree with @BrianLevin that while this feature may be welcome, it provides more flexibility if the user would be able to choose which tracks are patched to the existing timeline tracks. Now you can only match track numbers which is totally unusable in the context of the implied issue from the original post:

“Editors have long expressed that automatic track creation can disrupt their editorial flow because it can upset intentional track setups, in particular when the source has more audio channels than the editing sequence.”

What happens now is that the ‘missing source tracks’ are still selected in the ‘hidden area’ but nothing happens, they don’t get placed to enabled target tracks while mechanically this should be the behavior.

The current implementation simply feels like an added “hack” that goes against existing logic to fulfill one specific scenario.

Not sure if ghosting tracks is the right solution there, I'm sure there are more clever options.

In a case where you source patch any set of 5 channels into a 4 track timeline you could also give the user the ability to add the last track with a modifier key while dragging or inserting through hotkeys.

It's always worth trying to make one feature/idea the absolute best it can be rather than only implementing the bare minimum.

S

ScottSimmons

Community Expert

Yaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!! 😀

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