recording live effects in audition using sennheiser AMBEO orbit plugin

When Audition was originally designed (we're talking Cool Edit here) the recording procedure was intended to represent good industry practice, which was (and still is) to record dry, and add any processing afterwards - the simple reason for this is that if you add anything at record time, you can't get rid of it again afterwards if there's too much of it.

It was also recognised though that people were going to want to hear what their audio sounded like with effects added at recording time, and so they came up with a sneaky solution - and that is that whilst you can add an effect into the recording chain, all that happens is that you are monitoring the effect, not recording it. So you can hear it at record time, but the actual recording you make doesn't include it. This can catch you out if you aren't careful, and there's also another downside to it - it introduces latency. That's inevitable because to do this, all of your audio has to be digitised, processed with the effect added and then sent back out again and that takes a finite amount of time. So if you add an effect to a track whilst monitoring your own voice on headphones, it's nearly impossible to speak or sing because of the delay. This is why all proper sound devices have a straight-through monitoring facility, sending the mic signal directly back to your headphones. Without that, you're stuffed for monitoring.

So, in principle you can add AMBEO to the monitoring chain, and you will hear it (delayed slightly) as a real-time effect. And because it's in the monitoring chain only, you'll be able to remove it and/or retrack it after the recording. The reason that I said 'in principle' is because I haven't tried it. What I don't know is whether you can record the automation at the same time as a track input (yes, Audition has an automation system - there are tutorials about that). My inclination would be not to bother with trying to record the automation whilst recording, for two reasons; firstly because it's dead easy to replay the track and record the automation after the main recording, and secondly because in general, Audition optimises itself at record time to get rid of all extraneous processing it doesn't need to be doing - like automation writes. I'm not saying you can't do it - just that I don't know whether it will work or not.

So with those constraints, it's over to you - you'll have to try it and find out what's possible, and report back. Look on the bright side - AMBEO is free, so this isn't going to cost you anything but some time.