OK MCi, now I get where you are coming from ...
When I first read your opening post I thought it was about simulating an environment where you wanted to learn how to mix VIA an Old School approach ...
I didn't realize your computer was the main issue as to what is holding you back ....
Yeah , it sounds like you need a new computer . In the mean time I wouldn't let that stop you .....
You can work around that pretty easy for now
Here's a couple of things you can do if you are still interested in what I have to say ...
(all of these approaches I have done when I was in a similar position as yours ...)
MCi
- which tracks to freeze or bounce to claw back as much processing power I can
Since the track is frozen you now have all the rendered sounds and effects already on you track ...
I discovered a long time ago that when you freeze a track you can still edit the actual rendered frozen file...
By that I mean you can slice , dice , copy and paste sections of the track all over the place ...
the only rub is once the track is unfrozen you loose all your edits ....
What I used to like to do was to open up another new project in SONAR , set the new project to the tempo of the song I was working on and then copy my frozen track over to the new project in the correct place in the time line
The beauty in that was kept my parent project as it was and my child project of the song was a clean fresh start that had lot's of CPU on tap ...
If you happen to be freezing a lot of tracks in you project you may consider add this tech to your work flow ..
MCi
- which tracks I can afford not to freeze or bounce because they need further work,
Well if your working on something , your still working on it ....
if you have taken my previous suggestion I would say put that over in the new child project and have a go it it there also ...
you never know , since you already have it safely in your parent project , you have nothing to loose by taking risks and trying things out you may not have tried ....
MCi
- which plug in’s to use depending on how hard they hit the CPU.
This one here can be a can of worms depending on a lot of factors ...
typically a lot of people with hefty computers attempt to do every thing in real time while the project is playing ..
if you got the horse power to go there by all means ...
Having said that there are a bunch of ways you can approach this task ....
if it's a per track thing you can free up some resources by bouncing your soloed track into a new audio track and then archiving your parent track ....
if it's a master buss thing you may want to consider exporting your song as individual tracks / stems ...and reopening a new project and placing them in there ...
I mention this because I have no idea of what version of SONAR you are using ,,,,if you have SPLat you can always
evaluate your songs progress in the effects area by using MixRecall ...
in any event if its a master buss effects thing , you don't want to double hit your processed tracks in the parent project ....
As you may have deducted by now , I'm a firm believer in having a parent project with everything intact while using a child project to go wild in it .....
Not having a heavy duty PC has brought me to that crossroads ....
What are the benefits of trying this workflow out ?
all your stuff will be safe in at least two places ...your current computer will probably be able to handle any wheres between 25 to maybe 40 tracks of processed audio .....
not sure if this helps you ...anyway have a nice one ,
Kenny