Bouncing

Bouncing Instrument Parts

When working with musical performance data, users often want to print the audio being generated by external MIDI and internal virtual instruments to audio so that the Part can be treated like a normal Audio Track. Studio One offers a special feature to accommodate this.

To quickly bounce any Instrument Part to an Audio Track, select the Instrument Part, and then select Bounce Selection in the Event menu or simply press [Ctrl]/[Cmd]+[B] on the computer keyboard. This renders the selected Instrument Part to a new Audio Event and places it at the correct Timeline position on a new Audio Track. Note that the Instrument Part's active Insert Effects, as well as Volume and Pan settings, are rendered to the new bounced audio file. The new Audio Track is created without Inserts, and with Volume and Pan set to their defaults.

When an Instrument Part is bounced, the Part is muted, since the new Audio Event is taking its place. The Instrument Part is grayed out to indicate this. To toggle the mute on the Part, select the Part and press [Shift]+[M] on the keyboard.

Any number of Instrument Parts can be selected and bounced to audio at once, even across multiple Instrument Tracks. A new Audio Track is created for each Instrument Track whose Part is bounced to audio.

If you want to create a single Audio Event, you should first merge various Instrument Parts on an Instrument Track to create a single continuous Instrument Part. To do this, select the desired Parts and choose Merge Events, or press [G] on the keyboard.

Bouncing Audio Events

When many edits have been performed across an Audio Track to one or multiple Audio Events, the arrangement can become difficult to look at and hard to work with. For instance, if a drum loop has been cut into many slices, with some parts duplicated, other parts deleted, and so on, moving or rearranging the Events can become difficult.

In this case, it may be helpful to render some or all of the contents of a Track to a single, continuous, new Audio Event. To do this, select the desired Audio Events and press [Ctrl]/[Cmd]+[B], or select Bounce Selection from the Event menu. A new Audio Event is created for each Track that has an Event selected. The new Audio Events is created and placed according to the position and range of the selected Events for each Track.

Note that Bounce Selection is unaffected by Track Volume, Pan, and Insert settings, as it is only dealing with the Audio Events exactly as they exist in the Arrange view. Thus, the result of this process does not affect what you hear; it is simply an organizational tool.

Similarly, drag-and-drop any Audio Event or selected range of audio to a location in the File Browser to export an audio file to that location.

Creating Audio Parts

It is also possible to clean up the arrangement by using Audio Parts, where multiple separate Audio Events can be placed into a single container in the arrangement, while keeping the separate Events accessible in the Audio Editor. To do this, select multiple Audio Events in the arrangement and then press [G] on the keyboard, or [Right]/[Ctrl]-click and select Event/Merge Events from the contextual menu.

If you drag-and-drop an Audio Part from the arrangement to the File Browser, an Audio Loop is exported. For more information on Audio Loops, refer to the Editing chapter.

To dissolve an Audio Part so that the separate Audio Events are again accessible in the arrangement, [Right]/[Ctrl]-click on the Audio Part and select Audio/Dissolve Audio Part from the contextual menu.

Bounce to New Track

You can create a new Audio Track from a selected Instrument or Audio Track which includes all Insert effects, by selecting Bounce to New Track from the Event menu, or pressing key command [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[B] in Windows, or [Option]+[Cmd]+B in macOS.

You can also right/[Ctrl]-click on an Event and chose the function from the Events sub-menu.

Bounce File Management

Every Bounce operation creates new audio files that are placed into the Pool for the current Song.

Mixdown Selection

Sometimes, it can be useful to mix down Events from multiple Tracks to a new Track within your Song, such as when you want to consolidate a group of backing vocals or drum elements to a single Track. To do so, first select the Events you want to mix down, across as many Tracks as needed. Then choose Mixdown Selection from the Events menu, or [Right]/[Ctrl]-click one of the selected events, and choose Mixdown Selection from the pop-up menu.

The resulting mixed-down Track is placed after the last selected Track.