I used to export drum mix's (AD2) and bring them back as a fresh track, just to stop me from continually tweaking the hat, or the snare, (or pretty much everything) and wasting too much time. Now I can do what Craig does and keep the audio in the drum folder, done, finished, non tweakable!! Yeah, right, but I do end up with, well, multiple drum mix's to pick from. I wouldn't have thought the aux tracks would have made such a difference either, but it has for me. We've come along way since Splat was introduced me thinks.

Hi,
From where I am,the breakthrough with the aux tracks is that they are are located in the track area,before it came out ,I had much more busses than tracks . Now I can put for example the compressed guitar and the D I guitar and the miked guitar and the ghost guitar ,and the double take in a track labeled Guitar which is sent in a bus labeled music which collects keys bass and guitars. It helps me keeping the bus pannel much cleaner.

I don't use aux tracks during writing and tracking because I typically need to use the 'clear all input echo' button which tends to break the aux tracks. But now I'm focusing on mixing, I'm using aux tracks to create subgroups and applying my fades and mix automation there. It's much easier to work with an aux where you know the baseline volume is 0.0, than trying to do it on individual tracks when those tracks have already got their own individual mix levels and you need to move up or down relative to that.