mixing down on N-track, several other q's...

[Phil]

okay, so I've been tinkering around trying to learn...

When I want to finally mix down I hit the mixdown button, and it mixes it all down to one file, but how do I mix down so I can change some of the faders on the mixer? I.E. So I can solo a bass track or whatever.

Is it that much better to mix down 3-4 tracks together to one track to save CPU? Does it really matter that much?

How do I set it up to save the audio tracks onto my other dedicated audio drive? For some reason it saves it to the ntrack folder but I don't see anywhere to save it to the other drive automatically.

Thanks,
Phil

[bobbo]

Hey Phil,
You can mix the tracks down as you play them I believe. You will see that option when you go to the place to mixdown. You might also want to try using the draw volume envelope button on the top of the screen, so you can edit the volumes of each track if you wish. If you press that button, there will be these volume lines on the tracks, then you hold down the control key on your keyboard and you can increase the volume of the tracks as you hit the left mouse button. Its hard to explain, but try it out and play around with it. It works good for muting certain parts of the tracks, increasing, decreasing etc. In the index of the manual that is in the software, it tells you lots of ways to pan, put in effects, volume stuff, just a bunch of editting things you can do for each track. Then listen to the song as you do these edits and changed them as you like until it all sounds good, then you can mixdown. I don't even know how to do a bunch of the stuff with the editting features, but there are a lot of them if you just fiddle around with them. I suggest learning these editting features on tracks you don't care about, because I have screwed things up and couldn't figure out how to get them back to their original state.
I like to mixdown 3 or 4 similar tracks (like guitar parts, or vocal parts etc) into one track because it gives me more tracks to work with, since my computer can only handle so many at a time.
In the preference section, hit paths (last one on the right) and on the bottom is a place were you can select the drive or folder you want all the tracks of your song to be stored.
Its kind of frustrating sometimes, but when you figure somethings out, you can see how nice it is. Good luck.
bobbo