Hello Everyone,
 
Just a few questions on when to Bounce to tracks and its purpose.
 
#1.  I have a bunch of softsynth tracks, is it EVER necessary to bounce these to an audio track?
 
#2.  Once my song is mixed and getting ready to be mastered, should I bounce ALL tracks to a new "mixed-down" audio track or is that unecessary?  Would it be best just to export all my tracks to a WAV file then import into a mastering suite?   I understand mastering engineers don't usually accept multitracks, correct?  But are we to bounce to 1 track via export to WAV or bounce to a mixdown track - and then export that mixdown track.
 
Any other areas I am not thinking of to use the Bounce feature?
 
Thank You,
Adam

I always freeze.
Some soft synths have different quality modes that may be set to "economy" while un-frozen but "best" upon being frozen.
Usually the cpu-intensive soft synths.
 

If you're not over taxing you're system it's not necessary to bounce or freeze tracks at all. If you have a soft synth that doesn't play back consistently that might be a candidate for a bounce.
 
Rocky

I freeze most soft synths.  Just out of habit and having been doing this since computers couldn't mix and generate a synth at the same time.  However, you don't need to if your computer can handle it.
 
The other reason to freeze or bounce is to have effected tracks available for archiving, so that in the future when your effects no longer include x-reverb you'll have a copy of the effect and track rather than having to find a similar effect.  And of course, I don't think bouncing includes auxiliary tracks and sends, like a reverb send.
 
It would be great if SONAR had a routine that would freeze all tracks at once as well as sends somehow.  And keep your original tracks unaffected.  And delete any clips you haven't used -  a quick clean process.

AT
 
It would be great if SONAR had a routine that would freeze all tracks at once as well as sends somehow.  And keep your original tracks unaffected.  And delete any clips you haven't used -  a quick clean process.

That's a feature request I could get behind.
 
Rocky

What I have been doing is create a "Softsynths" folder, just move all my softsynth tracks in there, bounce them each to an individual audio track... then I archive the entire "softsynth" folder.  This way I can now play with the audio as needed and my synth tracks are in the collapsed "softsynth" folder for archiving. :)

For the bass track I convert it to an audio track, then convert it from stereo to mono. I don't bother with others, just bouncing them all at mix time to a 'Mix minus bass' track, stereo and each one panned as I wish.  Finally, I bounce the bass track (panned centre) and the 'Mix minus bass' track to make my finished mix.  This keeps my bass track properly centred vis-a-vis the complete mix.
 

When a project is done, I do a "save as" with all tracks bounced and/or exported for compatibility with any DAW. Also in the future if I open up the original project and the synth has become incompatible or whatever, I still have a WAV file.

I do the same as Craig.
 
I name synth tracks (MIDI & bounced) with synth/path/to/the/patch.
Even with that, a few times I couldn't find some custom patches, but I still had the wavs, so I was covered. 

Doesn't all tracks freezed do the same as all tracks bounced? If not I better change my workflow.