Bouncing Virtual Instruments

Freeze will do the very same thing except you can unfreeze.

You can separate instrument tracks back to MIDI and audio tracks.

OK, thanks. My only concern with Freeze was that if the virtual instrument died for some reason that I would lose the track. I have had an issue lately with VIs failing. (An Electri6ity update blew up my library and then, later, some of my Vienna instruments disappeared.)

Freeze is fine. Just remember, that if you edit the frozen audio, you lose all the edits if you thaw the track.

John already mentioned this, but this is something I had to learn as well.  You can easily separate an Instrument Track into its respective MIDI and Synth tracks.  Just right click on the track and select "Split Instrument Track".  You can also recombine them later, by selecting both tracks together, right clicking one of them and selecting, "Make Instrument Track".  Works great.  :)
 
So far, I've found Instrument Tracks somewhat useful for cleaning up my tracks when I'm not working with them.  But for big projects with lots of synths, I drop all the synth tracks in a separate folder so I can just work with the MIDI.  This will probably be my default modus operandi from now on. 
 
So for now, my official opinion of Instrument Tracks is, "Meh."  Great idea, but not quite ripe.

Heather, Thanks. I will do this since I like to hide all MIDI in a folder so it doesn't show up on my V-Studio mixer. Bitflipper, Thanks. If I can drag the audio and then process or automate like any other audio, that really is the best of both worlds. By the way, how does one edit the title of a post? Although I am The Mighty Konrad, I did not mean to write "Veirtual" like an old Norse word.

I like to have the best of both methods. I'll freeze the synth and then ctl-shift-drag the frozen audio into an adjacent track.

That's exactly what I do. This way you don't have to worry if you add measures to the song or whatever (I think this confuses the "unfreeze").

konradh


Heather, Thanks. I will do this since I like to hide all MIDI in a folder so it doesn't show up on my V-Studio mixer. Bitflipper, Thanks. If I can drag the audio and then process or automate like any other audio, that really is the best of both worlds. By the way, how does one edit the title of a post? Although I am The Mighty Konrad, I did not mean to write "Veirtual" like an old Norse word.

I edited the title for you :) I think you should be able to edit the message yourself and change the title.

An audio track with a soft synth input has no need for record arm.  You either bounce or freeze it.

I am not sure what you are trying to do but with a soft synth play back is all you need to hear and manipulate other tracks while the synth plays.

Freeze and or bounce is only needed to turn the MIDI data into audio at a point in the process when you want to make all your edits permanent.

You don't need to freeze until you reach that point.

konradh


Thanks, John. It just seems inconsistent to be unable to record an audio track in the normal fashion, but no big deal. It works--thanks.

There is nothing normal about using a soft synth.  If it were a hardware synth than you would record the audio.

This is the way its always been in Sonar except there was no such thing as freeze. In order to save a soft synths output it had to be bounced. Freeze was a feature that came along a while back.