newbie midi question

You record just midi. It can be routed to a soft synth or an external synth. Midi is a protocol, not any kind of audio. If you want to export, you have to choose both: the midichanel and the audiochannel which holds the softsynth.

You need to "bounce to tracks" or record the live synth input onto an audio track to actually "record" it. Otherwise, you have a recorded MIDI track that "plays" the synth while it plays but nothing is recorded in the audio realm. HTH

ORIGINAL: ohhey

The softsynth doesn't record it's just like a rack mount sound module or keyboard, you use it to hear what you are playing and record the midi on a midi track to "drive" the softsynth. You can leave it like that and do the final mix with the midi track playing the software synth as it exports or if you want to you can select both the midi track and the software synth track and do a "bounce" to a new audio track for safe keeping or to reduce load on your computer. The way I work, I do one software synth at a time and bounce it to an audio track when I have the midi track edited and perfect. Then I hide and archive the midi track (just in case) and remove the software synth from the project to free up resources. Then I add the next software synth I need to use and do the same thing. You don't have to do this if your computer has enough CPU power to do all of them at once but I just like to get all of them converted to audio tracks before I start the final mix. It's also good for your backup and archive. I may not have some of those software synths on my next system but I can always do back and open an old project and remix it because I bounced everything to audio.

Frank, your post is relevant to some issues I've been grappling with, so I hope I'm not hijacking this thread to ask. If you work out your mixing parameters with the midi track, then presumably you've fixed, say, the volume and pan positions that you want. That means you can't touch the faders for the audio tracks. So what do you do, default them to max and center to begin with then use them only for inserting effects, etc? But if you choose to bounce, then *they* are the only controls left to tweak. However, if you'd already had say a pan set in the midi before the bounce, then the center position for pan on the corresponding audio track doesn't actually correspond to a centered sound. This sort of thing has led me to confusion city.

Just trying to get a handle on the best way to mix with softsynths, since I'm relatively new to it. Seems like if I'm not careful, it's easy to end up tweaking pan and volume with counter-intuitive results. This happened to me yesterday with JABB. I had one patch's pan position worked out in midi (to which the JABB (Kontact) player responds) then was trying to tweak it further using the corresponding audio tracks pan fader. So, for example, I was trying to move left of center a sound which was already right of center, and wondering why it was not moving as far as I'd expected it to. I suppose one solution is to make a template for each softsynth with each track volume maxed and pan centered. Then when used in a project, all mixing would be done in the midi tracks, as you say. It's hard, though, to have those luscious audio channel strips in the console and not touch those faders.

If you were to go back and remix one of those old projects that you mixed in midi but for which you no longer have the softsynth, you'd run into the same sort of issues, no? Just wondering whether I'm missing something about how to work out a consistent methodology for using both the midi and audio track mixing parameters without confusing the hell out of myself.

-Ron

thanks guy that's what I wanted to know
I guess I will pass midi to a track towards the end of the project..when I am 100% happy with the notes...

so to do that i simply need to put the synth in the inputs of an audio track and record?

You have to bounce to track the audio before you can use any audio processing. In other words, you have to have the actual audio on the track, not the audio output from your synth.

ORIGINAL: pisquano

guys sorry but I keep having problems...
I created an audio track and I put the midi synth as input and it all seems fine meaning that now I see the audio coming from the synth
BUT...when i try to do something with this new audio track i can't! for example I wanted to normalize the audio from the synth (for unkown reasons I have higher peaks in just a part of my drum part) but the options are greyed out on the new audio track....

I think I am missing something....please help!

Creating the audio track is not the same as recording it. Sounds like you haven't recorded it yet. This is done with Edit>Bounce to Tracks. cf. this section in the helpfile: Converting Your Soft Synth Tracks to Audio

HTH, Ron