bouncing bus audio

Hi all, I have a sonar 8.5 and am working on a project with quite a few tracks. I'm a little worried that i'm going to start running into cpu issues before the song is finished. I have five drum tracks that are all routed to my drum bus. Is there a way to consolidate all five tracks to one track, to free up space? Or is there a way to set up the input/output on the drum bus to record a single drum track? I'm using a fireface 800 in conjunction with Sonar. Thanks so much in advance!! Kelly

Thanks for such a quick reply!! :) My drums are live drum tracks. 5 mic's on the kit. each their own track. So,...i just need to select the 5 tracks, export, and click all the appropriate boxes when exporting, and then re-import back into the project? I'm at work now, but as soon as I get home, I'll give it a whirl. I think that will definitely work. Thanks again!!! Kelly

to free up space?

Its not worth the little space it takes up. in the grand scheme of things, its nothing and today's pc's can handle over 100 tracks with effects.
 
Now, if your CPU is overloading, just raise your ASIO buffers or WDM slider a bit.

thanks for all the responses! I'm sure the vst plugins are the culprit, not the # of tracks. Because I just started using more VST plugins. I'm at 25-30 tracks. My last project had very minimum VST's and I was around 60-70 tracks. My PC specs are windows xp 32 SP3. Q6600 quad core cpu. 4 Gb ram. 2 500 gig HD's. Fireface 800. Sonar 8. Where do you raise the ASIO buffers? I think i've seen that before, but am at work right now. I'm sure it is probably self explanatory, but what do you set the ASIO buffers to? Do Sonar's audio buffer settings work independently from the FF800? I have my FF800 set to 512 right now. When I lower the FF800's it will make a loud pop when i hit the space bar to stop or start the playback. My cpu/disc meter at the bottom of the screen frequently shows 30-60% cpu usage when playing back my audio on the current project. Will raising or lowering the sonar settings lower the cpu overload? Also, on a side note...i was thinking about upgrading to Windows 7 and getting another 4 Gb's of ram. I know you can run 32 bit version of Sonar in windows 7, but will 32 bit sonar in windows 7 be able to access more ram, and be able to handle more/be faster/etc? Thanks everyone for your info!! I really appreciate it.

will 32 bit sonar in windows 7 be able to access more ram

Basically, the answer is no. The only way to access more RAM is by running Sonar in 64 bit mode, which obviously means a 64 bit OS

This is a leap I have yet to make, and I'm reluctant to do so until more of the VST's I use on a regular basis are updated to 64 bit.