Picking out one track in thick PRV

I would like to be able to be in PRV mode with, say, 5 tracks displayed and be able to tell them apart more easily.
 
I have re-colored the tracks, but really when there are two dozen instruments in your piece, it can be grueling to color each one individually, and even if you do and save that as a project template, it's still hard to tell them apart. I've resigned to having a single color for a whole section, such as brass being orange, strings dark brown, vocals all white, etc. 
 
So.... if I want to look at, say, the whole wind section in PRV, something I want to do often for proper voicing within sections, etc., there's no way to tell which instrument is which note, except by making one the selected track, locking others, etc., but it's so hard to tell the grays apart in the list of tracks that it's sometimes too hard to tell which is the selected instrument anyway.
 
What I want is to have a feature I can toggle quickly, say with a toggle button in the toolbar, called "Highlight track on hover". So when I hover over a given note in PRV, it emphasizes all the other notes in the same track. Not selecting them per se, just letting you see what the other notes are for that instrument. 
 
Is there anything existing that will accomplish this?

jkoseattle
I would like to be able to be in PRV mode with, say, 5 tracks displayed and be able to tell them apart more easily.

Have you tried using Staff View? It's ideal for this.

Does it help to use the track list on the right to temporarily hide notes from specific tracks so you can see what you're left with?  I'm thinking that toggling them back and forth may help to visualize what's what.

Lots of good suggestions. 
 
Staff View - I haven't spent much time in it because too much of my editing deals with finessing the exact length of notes, and the details around velocities and just how quantized something should be would be lost. Plus, Staff View is only convenient if it understands what key you're in, and well, my music changes key a lot, and I've never bothered to set key sigs in Sonar - One more thing to worry about. However, it might be useful to look at in some instances. I should remember to try that, thanks.
 
Inline PRV - First off, that means I have to switch the edit mode for each track one at a time. (Brings up a whole can of worms about the amount of unnecessary clicking in Track View. Notice how you can select multiple tracks, but there is such a limited amount of things you can actually do with those multiple tracks? Can't attach sends, or set outputs, or much of anything. There used to be that semi-helpful triangle selector thing that would make Quick Groups or whatever they were called - what happened to that feature?) Also, this mode doesn't let me see the comparative voicings across tracks easily. 
 
Toggling in PRV - Imagine you're looking at a string section in PRV, perhaps 6 tracks, and you want to lock all but one of them. It requires at least 6 mouse clicks to do that. Ridiculous. In Photoshop, for example, you can say "Hide all layers but this one". Sonar should have something like that. Or how about "Lock all unselected tracks", so all I have to do is click on a track and everything else locks? Or even "Hide all unselected tracks"? Sometimes I wonder who is designing these things and how it is that no one spoke up and said "Hey - this is a real PITA, let's make it easier".
 
Truth is, I don't really care what color my tracks ever are. I just want to be able to tell them apart when I need to. How about a feature to automatically color displayed PRV tracks so that they can be distinguished easily? If that means they're different colors every time I open PRV, well that's why it would be a feature you could disable.
 
 

Hey Jim of Seatle,
 
I was listening to your stuff. I am an instant fan! Brilliant!
 
One question: Did you take the recording of the little kid singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and harmonize the orchestra to fit? How subversive! I love it!
 
and don't forget "uvula spelled backwards is 'a luv u'".  Perfect!
 
Thanks for the smile!

bentleyousley
Hey Jim of Seatle,
 
I was listening to your stuff. I am an instant fan! Brilliant!
 
One question: Did you take the recording of the little kid singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and harmonize the orchestra to fit? How subversive! I love it!
 
and don't forget "uvula spelled backwards is 'a luv u'".  Perfect!
 
Thanks for the smile!

Thanks! The Uvula song is going to be in the new album, but that recording you heard isn't me singing, actually, my recording of it is next up once this fake live song is done. (Although Sonar destroyed all my vocal tracks so I have to sing them all over - see new thread I'm about to start about that...) Twinkle Twinkle Little Star is my daughter at age 2, and yeah, I took her recording exactly as she sang it and set myself the challenge of making the accompaniment match whatever she did, including key changes and extra beats. Don't all parents want the world to play in tune with their children so that they can sing their song in their own way?