In all those twelve years I use Cubase I never checked out how to reorganize the Audio Mixer channels.
I took me a few hours to get the picture, so I'd like to share the right method with you.
This is the start situation.
Say you're working on a song, and in order to free CPU resources you have to bounce audio tracks a lot.
So you end up with a song which has quite a few audio tracks, along with their corresponding channels in the Audio mixer.
Because you decided to delete some originals after bouncing, you have left let's say 40 audio tracks and 70 channels in the Audio Mixer, 30 of them not referred to by audio tracks.
So some of the audio tracks are realy active in use, others are muted and hanging standby in the song arrangement, others are deleted already from the arrangement or its files even from the Audio Pool.
To clean the battlefield you delete all unused, muted tracks.
At the end you're left with for instance 20 active stereo audio tracks with their respective mixer channels, devided arbitrary over the 60 present mixer channels.
It's annoying you have to see all the time those unused useless channels in the Audio Mixer.
In combination with a few VSTi instruments with several output mixer channels the Audio Mixer looks quite huge, and you must manoeuver all the time.
I wanted to get rid of the confusing unused channels, without loosing 'track' between the audio track's channel number and the corresponding mixer channel with all the fx an eq settings.
I know you can copy/ paste mixer channels to other channels numbers hand by hand and one by one.
But I thought there must be a way to let the computer do this, save and fast.
After all, this is how I did it:
1.
Reorganize all your audio tracks by listing them following the track's channel number as indicated in the track's info part in the arrangement.
For example, say (to keep it simple) your song has left, after deleting the redundant tracks, five tracks with channel numbers 43/44, 17/18, 59/60, 3/4 and 21/22, appearing in this order in your arrangement.
Now re-organize your tracks by just changing the rank order of the tracks from up to down by dropping the tracks in place.
Don't change the track's channel number itself, just put the lowest number on the first row, and so on.
Then you get: 3/4, 17/18, 21/22, 43/44 and 59/60.
This step is just for your convenience, as we shall see.
2.
Go to the file menu on the Audio Mixer itself, on the very left.
There you can select 'Save selected channels'.
You first have to select the channels you want to keep, and you have to do this one by one, by right-clicking (mac: shift-clicking) on the little white button bar down at the channel strip, right under the channel's fader setting.
In our example we select the channels which represent our 5 audio tracks.
lets say the mixer's channel numbers are: 1/2, 7/8, 9/10, 21/22, 35/36 and 61/62.
Make sure you didn't miss one, and save this file of selected channels to your current song folder.
If you don't click again on any channel select button, all channels stay selected, which can come handy later in step 3.
There is no button with 'Shuffle all audio and mixer tracks to the minimum of possible numbers', so we have to do it by hand:
2.
Reduce the number of audio (mixer) channels to the number of left audio channels, in our example we should keep 20 of them.
You have to do this in Options-Audio-System, choose the number of channels, APPLY, en give OK.
Now the mix of the song sounds terrible, because the audio tracks are played by the wrong mixertracks, some tracks even don't give any sound coz they double with others on the same channel.
To solve this we have to get back the original active channels we saved before..
3.
Now if you did de-select them, select -again one by one
- as much mixer channels as we have audio channels, in fact select all of them, coz we matched the number of channels with the number of tracks, but you could of course have created more of them.From the mixer's file menu, load the 'selected channels file' from disk.
The channels will load in the selected ones, but now check the channel numbers: they still show the old number, from before the saving.
So for instance you get in the third stereo channel (numbered 5/6 in the white select bar) track channel 49/50, which you see at the bottem of the channel strip.
You still can see where it all came from, even while some old track channel numbers are higher then the highest mixer channel number.
Now we have the right new Audio Mixer with all previous channels' settings from 1/2 to 41/42.
But still that terrifying sounding mix, making you more and more nervous...
4.
Now change the channel numbers of the audio tracks in the arrangement in numerical rank from 1/2.
So the track with channel 3/4 gets 1/2, and first next 17/18 gets 3/4, etc., up to 9/10 for our 5 stereo channels.
Press enter, and listen: aaahhh, so-o beautifull...
Step one is a safety step, specially for songs with more than a few audio tracks.
Having done step1, in step 4 you just have to number down the tracks in the rank you already have them
You could do this blind!
Otherwise renumbering the tracks' channels could be tricky, because you can easyly loose track of the correlation between track channel number and mixer channel number.
I was quite happy with the result, coz I wanted this since long time, specially since I have so much VST's and VSTi's open and bounce all tracks often even more than once.
Hope someone can benefit from it!
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