I have recorded many of our band practices into 12 tracks of Sonar using a 2004 laptop. The best method for me was to create a template as mentioned. It only takes a few minutes. Start with the 16 track Sonar template. Then name tracks and set inputs to the correct channel of your interface. There's lots of stuff you can pre meditate. One thing I do is save them ready to record all tracks.  

I do the "save as" to a separate folder for each song and just name them with a number or if I know which songs we'll play the names. These song folders are within the session folder. I'll be transferring it later as one big file to my desktop DAW> 

At the night of the rehearsal I open ALL of the CWP files and minimize to the the bottom. You can have an unlimited amount of files open apparently. I've had at least 16 open at once. 

It will only take a few seconds to open that file and start the recording. And easy to hit "save" when done. If a second take is needed of a song I just add it to the end of the first take. Or if there's time, save take 1, record over take 1, and do a "save as" and name it " take 2. " Worst you can do is erase take 1 which was probably a bad version anyways. 

The beauty of this system is most of your songs will be separated CWP files.. If the band is on a roll and doesn't stop between songs no big deal. Just keep rolling. You might not get a chance to drink your beer, that's all. 

I would defiantly not want to chance on a 2 hour multi track recording bombing out on you at some point. Break it it to smaller bits at least. But having a bunch of templates ready to roll is the ticket. 

Yeh Johnny,

I love having the templates made up, which a generally set to whatever the interface has capable on inputs, tracks labeled, routed and armed.  All ready to just hit RECORD  

Reading the initial post, I was assuming he was playing, wanted to hit record and forget about it until he had a chance to check on it.

Outside of that I would definitely find a few spots throughout the jam session to hit PAUSE and Save  

It works pretty good for me but it did take a few sessions before we got the sounds dialed in. The Uncle Ruckel recordings on my sound cloud site in my signature are the result of this method. 

Thanks guys for all the good advise.  This is really helped me.  Dan

cool. i take it the session is over and it went well.  if you could share some feedback on what worked for you and what didn't so the rest of us who do this kinda recording can learn a bit from your experiences! :D