Bouncing Audio Tracks in SONAR

While working with individual audio tracks gives you the most editing and recording flexibility, there may be occasions when you will want to combine audio tracks to maximize audio performance. To do this, SONAR lets you borrow a concept from the old analog tape days known as bouncing tracks.

The Technique

We should really think in terms of audio polyphony, instead of audio tracks. The reason is because many audio events can be combined on the same track, but this does not decrease the audio polyphony that is being used. When the system has reached the maximum audio polyphony it is capable of, you can combine (bounce) audio events onto a single event, and free up some of the available polyphony (if you need to record additional audio).

Let's use the 'Riff Funk Audio and MIDI Demo.bun' file as an example:

1. Open 'Riff Funk Audio and MIDI Demo.bun'.
2. Select all 4 audio tracks.
3. Right-click anywhere among the selected audio data, and select Bounce to Tracks from the inspector menu.
4. Select the empty track where you'd like the resulting track to end up. In this case, let's choose track 10. Click OK.

The selected audio tracks have now been combined into one audio event on track 10.

Once again, you should think in terms of audio polyphony, not audio tracks. Simply moving all audio clips to the same track will not combine them into one audio event. A single audio track can consist of several overlapping audio events, which will use the same amount of audio polyphony as if the audio events were on separate tracks.

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