I had been contemplating the purchase of an ARC USB to use as kind of a 5.1 monitor controller and was thinking about ways to set up TM to do that.

I have a BBF Pro FS and use a third party ADAT expander. Right now my workflow consists of having 2 snapshots that I load via the A and B buttons to switch between 5.1 and stereo. Both snapshots are setup with the main out being PH3/4 (Headphones) and speaker B being the AN 1/2 output (currently nothing attached, but in future will be used for a dedicated stereo speaker pair), toggled via BBF output button. A fader group is active in both snapshots, linking the main out (PH3/4 and AN 1/2) and the ADAT 1-6 faders.

The difference between the snapshots is that in the 5.1 snapshot all software playback channels going into the main out are at -inf and each ADAT submix receives audio at an equally set dBFS level from the relevant software playback channel. In the stereo snapshot it is the other way around and all software playback channels send -inf to the ADAT outputs while the main out basically receives a normal stereo via playback channels 1/2 and a 5.1 folddown with ADAT 1-6 panned as required.

The only thing I am missing for this to be an entirely workable surround setup is a way to solo surround channels. Most of the time I don't need to solo individual speakers and can live with soloing L+R, LS+RS, C, LFE and combinations thereof. I have tested this idea by setting the four solo groups to solo the respective software playback channels as described and came to the conclusion that within a single snapshot that could work nicely if I had an ARC with physical buttons to control the solos.

The only problem is, that I regularly switch between the 5.1 setup and stereo and that the soloed channels unsolo themselves when I switch snapshot (or more precisely switch to the state they were in when saving the snapshot).

I just found out about the release of TM2 and got excited about the feature for loading groups/snapshots independently. However after trying out TM2 I realized that it is not about decoupling the on/off state of existing groups from snapshots but about loading entirely different configurations of groups. So this doesn't solve my issue.

So I am wondering if an option to maintain the on/off state of existing groups across snapshots is maybe a feature that you (RME) could add to TM2, or if there is a wiser way to achieve what I want with my existing gear (and potentially an ARC USB) without shelling out big bucks and needing physical space for an actual surround monitor controller?