Batch Bouncing MIDI Tracks to Audio: Multitimbral Hardware w/ Single Stereo Audio Out

[bboxdw]

I love many things about my primary DAWs, Bitwig and Cubase. However, I was surprised to discover that neither of them could handle this specific type of batch track processing situation:

Some of my projects use a multitimbral external hardware MIDI sound module for many tracks, with all MIDI channels sharing the module's same single stereo pair of audio outputs. (In my case, an old Yamaha MU128.)

This means that bouncing a project's MIDI tracks to audio requires soloing each MIDI track, one-by-one, and recording the audio input from the external hardware in real time. That's a very time-consuming process to do manually for a project with many tracks.

I even explored the MEAP add-on for Cubase, but that doesn't appear to be equipped to handle this specific type of situation.

After importing some of my MIDI files into Studio One and reading up on its aux channels feature, I was excited to see that Studio One automates much of this process. I can select a number of tracks to be exported as audio, and Studio One automatically solos and bounces them one-by-one, going through the list until all the selected tracks have been bounced.

Awesome!

It's still a bit of a pain vs. being able to just do the bounce in Bitwig or Cubase, because I still have to do some setup on the tracks after importing them into Studio One, and then bring the bounced audio files back into Bitwig or Cubase if I want to do additional processing there. But it still beats the alternative of having to manually solo and bounce every track one-by-one.

I wanted to mention this solution here, so it will pop up in searches for others who may be struggling with the same problem. Kudos to the PreSonus team for including this in their DAW.

[bboxdw]

Edit to the above: Unless I'm missing a setting somewhere, it looks like Studio One can't read/send tracks with MIDI sysex data (as Cubase does), which XG MIDI modules like mine use for recording some of their automation. So for projects that have external hardware MIDI tracks with sysex data, those tracks will still need to be bounced in a sysex-capable DAW like Cubase.