In a project I love bouncing every MIDI track, and even almost every Audio track (with its effects) so as to land in the end with a clean project with only bounced tracks (I move the original MIDI/Audio tracks in the project folder to keep them archived just in case I need them one day for later edit or reuse). I only keep the return channels in place, since they can't be bounced.

Why? Because not only it saves CPU, but also it's perfectly clean and stable this way as well all know.

Now the problem with this, it's extremely slow and exhausting process - I'm looking for a way to reduce the time this process takes.

I have a project with 50/60 tracks and 6 return channels:

1. I need to create an audio file for each track, that's 50/60 more tracks. I wanna keep them individual stems because I'm sending it to a mixing engineer later, and I don't want to group stuff since he's gonna be mixing them
2. The problem with that is that :

• Ableton doesn't automatically create the same volume level than the original say MIDI track, so I have to either use Utility if the sound level is being automated or use the volume fader which is also a pain (because as we know it, volume is the only parameter which needs to be assigned independently on any channel)
  
  
• Ableton doesn't remember 'Post FX' by default in the newly created Audio bounced track, so that's one more step each time
  
  
• Ableton doesn't automatically assign the same levels of return channels on the newly created Audio bounced tracks, so that's an additional pain in the arse to add them manually to match the original tracks return levels (and automation of those, if any)
  
  
• and of course I need to not forget to select Input Type, to record each of the 50/60 tracks - this step seems easy but it's very time consuming and easy to make mistakes with 50/60 tracks to properly routed
  
  
• and then I need to finally record, and it's gonna take me the length of the track so 7/8 minutes
  
  
• and then I'm gonna have to double check if everything went right

That's probably 1-2 hours of work.

Is there not another way to do this?

I've tried a few experimental bouncing apps but I'm not convinced, I'd like to stick to Live internal features since it's always risky to do otherwise.

Cheers!

 

Last edited: Jul 24, 2022