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Question

Need suggestions to optimize my export workflow

Forum|Forum|13 days ago
April 23, 2026
3 replies
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I am editing and mixing an album of classical music that I recorded over the course of a week. I have finished editing every piece, and every piece has its own multitrack session. Each session contains 12 tracks (mics), and each track contains 20-50 splices, depending on the piece. Each splice may reference a different file of audio recorded in the initial multitrack session (there were lots of stops and starts so they could listen back to their takes). I assume this is pretty standard so far.

I need to figure out the best way to export these tracks WITHOUT effects and mixing. Since I tend to mix as I go, each session and each track has active effects, gain adjustments, and stereo panning adjustments, depending on the track.

I have maxed out what my MacBook Pro can handle before slowing to a painful chug. My goal is to export each track AS IS with no effects, no gain adjustments, no stereo panning. Then, each track will become a single file that I can work with more easily. I can then upload all 108 files (clips) across 12 tracks into a new multitrack session in order to create a consistent mix across all 9 pieces.

Currently, if I export a multitrack mixdown, all music gets downmixed to a single file, including effects, panning, and gain adjustments. If I export only selected clips to a single file, it again exports all effects, panning, and gain adjustments.

At this point I assume my question is obvious, but just to reiterate, how do I export all clips in a single track to a single file WITHOUT adding effects and mix adjustments? Am I going to have to remove all mixing and effects, or are there any workarounds I should try that would save time?

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

It’s a session history - session, as in the one you are currently in, not the one you’ve saved and reopened. And in the current one you can step backwards and forwards through level and pan changes without any difficulty - just right-click on any given change in the history list and you get options. When it comes to changes made to effects it’s not quite the same. If you add the effects rack to a track, then that’s tracked, but the changes made to parameters within it don’t appear to be - probably because tracking all of them would create an asbsolute monster of a session file. So history isn’t absolute - it’s only local to the session you’re actually in, and it’s certainly not comprehensive.

Rag and Bone

Community Expert

Sorry, I’m not clear on why you added effects and other adjustments to the sessions if you didn’t want to retain them. Can you clear that up for me?

S

steve.krAuthor

Known Participant

I’ve maxed out my computer’s capabilities. Each session references too many individual audio files, and the few effects I’ve enabled leave little room for customizing the mix without it being really slow. I want to create a consistent mix across all tracks and easily hear how the mix affects all tracks without having to open 9 different sessions and slowly copy settings between them.

S

steve.krAuthor

Known Participant

Okay, I did figure out how to export all tracks as individual files from one session in a single go, but in order to do it I seemingly had to save all my effects racks on clips and tracks as presets, disable all effects on clips and tracks, disable all mixing on clips and tracks, and disable all gain and stereo panning keystone adjustments on all clips and tracks, and basically zero everything out. It was a mild pain, but probably the best option.

Once I did all that, I created a new session, recreated the same tracks and effects settings, added the audio, confirmed via listening that the new session sounded virtually identical, saved the session, and I finally compared the file size of my new session folder to the old one, and I dropped from 41.9 GB to 5.4 GB, which is definitely promising. All I have to do now is repeat the above steps on each session in order to export the spliced audio tracks as single files, and then drag them in. Then I can adjust individual clips as needed.

At least I have a solution, but it’s definitely cumbersome. If anyone has any suggestions on what to do for the remainder of this album, or things I should do next time to make this entire process easier, I would really appreciate it.

SteveG_AudioMasters_

Community Expert

I read the first post and thought about it before reading your second one, and the only thing I could come up with is slightly different, but possibly easier. It doesn’t require you to create another session from scratch; all you have to do is take the current session and do a ‘Save As’. This will give you a copy of the session (your original one is still intact) on which you can simply go through and remove all of the effects, and then do your exports from it.

The other thing you should consider, if you haven’t already, is pre-rendering the effects on tracks, which will increase the number you can handle simultaneously without grinding to a halt significantly. If you are not familar with the concept, look here.

S

steve.krAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks, Steve. Yes, that’s what I’ve started doing, and it seems like that will work great. I thought I was pre-rendering all my effects, or at least prioritizing high quality rendering, but the button for pre-rendering isn’t always visible, so it’s definitely possible I’ve skipped it a few times. I’ll try enabling it by default from now on, and I’ll test it on my slowest running sessions.

Next time I have a project like this, I think I’ll “save as” my original session, do time alignment, markup and cut the audio I want to use, then create a new session and paste in the audio I want so that it doesn’t needlessly reference tons of WAV files, then I’ll edit together the piece in mono with no other effects, zero out any gain adjustments, export the spliced together audio track by track like I did in this post, and finally create a new session with the exported audio that I can mix with as few files referenced as possible, pre-rendering as often as I can. That should lighten the load on my CPU as much as possible.

Since this is only a classical album, I haven’t felt much need to work with pre/post-fader routing or sends; all of that is a nebulous concept to me that I’ve never understood intuitively. I could probably bluff my way through and explanation of it all, but I admittedly haven’t taken time to understand it, whether in Audition or using a professional console. I just haven’t had anyone take me through any scenarios where I needed to understand it intuitively. Not sure if any of that would help me, but if so, let me know.

I do have one question: Why does Audition not save mixing changes to my history panel? If I adjust the gain or panning knobs, then click “Undo,” it doesn’t undo my mixing adjustments, it only undoes the last task I did within the multitrack window itself. This seems to be the case with the effects rack as well. Why doesn’t it tracks these changes?

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