Spider,
when we're talking about virtual tracks , is this like alchuck said, the ability to recall (well i there not really tracks) audio files??? I hope i havent got this all arse about, if i have can someone explain please?
Whew, not quite sure what you're asking there, Spider... but all the audio you record on a DAW is saved to hard disk unless you have a staggering anount of RAM. The application manages this for you so you don't necessarily think of there being files there, but believe me, there are. In Cakewalk, the settings for the track are saved in the project file, and the actual audio is saved in wav files. When you archive one, it essentially keeps a little pointer in the project file to where the audio data is stashed away. This is different than
muting a track where the audio data is still being handled by the CPU but its volume has been reduced to zero, so this doesn't really save you CPU cycles.
I'd be willing to bet my old
Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space record -- if I still had it -- that both Logic and Cubase allow you to do something similar.
AlinMV,
I suppose I could start a new project (same song, different file) and record a second take of whatever track I need. The question I had was "is there something less cumbersome than having to do such a thing with computer based DAW"?
Why start a new file? That would indeed be a cumbersome thing to do. Let me describe it by example. Again, I'm talking about Cakewalk, but I'm sure Pro Tools LE, Logic, and Cubase all have something similar.
Say you're trying to record a singer, and you want to capture multiple takes; you'll listen back later and decide which are the best, whether you want to double any or comp two or more of them together into a best-of-all-takes track.
So you pick a series of tracks out of your 256 that you have available, like say Tracks 10-20. Record take one on Track 10. Rewind and record Take 2 on Track 11, etc, until you've got your ten (or eleven) takes. Now you pick the best one, or even make some more tracks that are combinations of the best parts of the others. But you don't want to erase tracks until maybe later when you're all done and you know for sure that Track 12, for example, bites the big one and you want to remove it from existence.
While you're working on the mix, and you want all the choices available, you can either mute the tracks that you're not currently listening to, or, if your track load is getting way up there and your computer is starting to get a headache, you can archive them. As far as a way of working in Cakewalk, archiving is as simple as muting -- just click the little A button rather than the M button.
Hope that helps clarify...
-AlChuck