The same thing usually happens the first time you listen to a track while you are printing it. We all know how a mix can sound totally different the minute you play it for someone else. This is an excellent opportunity for quality control. First and foremost, realtime printing allows you to intently listen to the track from start to finish. Obviously, this way of printing your final mix happens in realtime, which is usually fine for pop songs but may be frustrating for podcasts or movies that are dozens of minutes long.ĭespite the time it takes, there are several benefits to printing your final mix within a session. Then press record on the print track and record the new audio file of your mix-just make sure you’re not monitoring the output of the record track (simply mute it) to prevent double-monitoring or feedback issues. Simply route your mix bus (via sends or busses) to the input of a new stereo audio track. Instead of bouncing, we can simply record our mix bus onto a new audio track and print our mix right into our session.Įach DAW may have slightly different routing options, but printing a mix to a new track inside the mix session is easy. The speed of an offline bounce is variable, depending on the CPU and disk usage of the particular mix you are bouncing. Realtime bounces take the full amount of time to create the mixdown file, while offline bounces happen faster than realtime. Bouncing creates a digital mix file that can be saved in any location for quick and easy reference. In this blog, we’ll break down the pros and cons of printing vs bouncing mixes to help you determine the best approach for your workflow.ĭAWs provide an easy and efficient way to ‘bounce’ a session, either in realtime or offline. The only time you would benefit from a dedicated master recorder is if you wish to run your mix through other hardware boxes (analog or digital) on the way to the master recorder and capture your mix at a different sample rate or bit depth than your mix DAW. But which is best? Alesis Masterlink ML-9600 There are benefits to all these approaches. When working entirely in-the-box, there are three mixdown options: we can ‘bounce-to-disk’ we can print our mix onto a new track in our mix session we can still print the mix to a stand-alone hardware digital recorder, like a second DAW, an Alesis Masterlink, or a high-resolution DSD recorder. Since the dawn of the DAW, we have the ability to simply ‘bounce’ full sessions inside our computer to create a digital mixdown file of the final mix. Later, there were high-resolution digital “master recorders” that recorded onto digital tape or disk. Before the advent of digital recording technology, engineers had to physically print their multi-track recordings from a mixing console to a two-track (stereo) tape machine in order to create a final mixdown.

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