Just wondering what the "correct" process should be.
After recording tracks, adding soft synths etc. 
Should the soft synths be bounced to tracks and then deleted before exporting to wav's?
What are the ups or downs of leaving the soft synths and not bouncing them to a track?
 
Is there some better documentation on the "mechanical" process of production using Sonar?
 
tia
meh

Few things... obviously you save computer processing headroom by not having a bunch of live synths and effects running... also some synths may have dynamic elements in the patches, meaning you get a more "stable" version of the track once it's bounced to audio, which can help in the mixdown stage.

You probably don't want to delete the original tracks after bouncing in case you want to go back and change something or the bounce captured a bad version of the MIDI performance. Just freeze and mute those tracks before export.

There is no correct "production process" hence it is not documented. There is no reason to delete the synth and it might be a bad idea since deleted synth tracks are difficult to get back, just like any destructive edit. Bouncing tracks is the old method of printing the audio from a softsynth. Freezing has pretty much replaced bouncing. Freezing synths (not the track) during the mixing process allows one to work with a fixed set of audio tracks. Freezing a synth still affords the flexibility to unfreeze and modify the synth settings. Freezing also frees up computer resources.

I wasn't sure about the freeze vs. bounce thing because there seems to be so much differentiation in tuts/discussions on the topic. If the result is the same that is good to know. Keeps the track count down and is less of a pain in the arse. Cheers.

Yes, freeze was introduced as a new feature some time ago with SONAR. Prior to freeze, all we had was bounce. Freeze functionally works like a bounce+archive frozen plug-ins. Freeze can work on synth audio only or entire audio tracks. Freezing a synth still allows the effects on the track to be modified. Freezing a track prints everything in the track. Whatever is frozen is removed from memory and is no longer processed by the CPU. Drag a frozen clip to a new track for an instant bounce.

scook
... Drag a frozen clip to a new track for an instant bounce.

Now that's a cool tip that I never knew about ... thanks, I'll be using that!

+1 on the instant bounce tip.  Thanks - I have a pretty high-end computer and so far have not run into memory or CPU issues, but I will definitely tuck this tip away in a little folder I keep with these kinds of tips in it.  I just save them in text files or Word docs, grouped by functional area.
 
Bob Bone

Yeah, me too, Bob. My elaborate notes ended up solving a massive problem I've been having lately. Gotta remember to actually look at the darned things. I wrote them for a reason. lol

If you don't freeze or bounce, you can still export to WAV or mp3 by checking the box called "Live Input."  You have to uncheck Fast Bounce to get that option.