How to know what is active

[mgd]

Especially the clean-up patterns, don't they eat up timing from a playing sequence though?

Well, that depends on how you use them.

In my opinion most of the time they are not required. Or let's look at it the other way:
When or why would you need a cleanup pattern.

My answer to that is:
Whenever you play a project after a project that makes (heavy) use of automators etc. you will want the new project to start with a clean slate. You can achieve a clean slate in two ways:

1. always setup each and every function in a setup pattern island
   
2. at the end of a project/song that makes use of (some) automators etc. stop/end/reset exactly those
   

1. obviously is not a very support friendly solution
2. is what I would propose. Practically you could do that by at the very end of your song/project starting the cleanup island (which obviously does not need to create any sound). It's also usually very fast, i.e. it should not require more than a second or two to do all the cleanup. And then you can load the next project.

Or did I misunderstand your question?

Kind regards,
Michael