Sometimes I create a handful of tracks (like a trio of vox tracks, for instance) and don’t create a bus for them until afterwards. It’s not hard to manually re-rout a few tracks from the master to their dedicated bus, but sometimes this happens with more then a few, or I have to switch a bunch of tracks to a new bus. I want to select all the tracks to change the output of, and switch them all at once, but this isn’t possible as far as I can tell. Is there a way around this I’m not aware of?
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There are a couple of ways you can do this. You can click & drag in the grid in the “Audio Connection Manager” (Window > Audio Connections) to make or break multiple connections at once; there’s also “Add New Subgroup Bus” in the right-click menu of the track group header to create a new bus (named as the group) and reassign all the tracks in the group to it.
Not quite the same, but related: you can also right-click on the “Show Sends” button of a bus in the Mixer window to add sends to that bus from all or selected tracks.
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In addition to all that @colinf mentioned…
Are you making direct connections, or using Aux Sends?
I recommend the latter, for two reasons:
- Robin himself recommends Aux Sends for delay compensation accuracy and assurance.
- I literally just made and published a Lua script for convenient Aux Send routing.
~Go there and check-out the gifs to see it working, and if it might be helpful for your workflow.
I made that script because I needed to do a lot of otherwise-tedious routing.
So far it has been a huge time-saver.
Cheers,
-J
…
[PS: The only direct connections I use at this point are the ones from the final pre-master buses (-like a ‘master’ Drums Bus, Guitars Bus, etc.) to the Master. ‒Everything else I use is an Aux Send. And yes, so far the latency compensation has never failed me. … But again, do whatever’s best for your particular style/workflow!
]
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Ahhh, I see, this is good to know, thank you! Yeah, I’m referring to direct connections because in this case it’s going, for instance, Snare Mic → Drum Bus → Master Bus, so I don’t want to use an aux send and simply duplicate the signal, making it louder. I’m routing a track through a bus before it reaches the master fader. Also, I rarely find myself connecting a bus to another but and THEN to the master anyway.
Many-to-one direct connections are absolutely fine regarding delay compensation, to quote the above linked thread:
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Do what you will, there’s no problem with it. But using Aux Sends won’t make it louder, just FYI. Anytime you use an Aux Send in this way, e.g. Snare → Drum bus, you simply disconnect the direct connection between the two, and the Aux Send becomes the new (and only) connection remaining.
Also, I’m pretty sure it would be possible to adapt my script to make direct connections instead. Hmm… Maybe I’ll add that functionality in the future.
~100%
But I personally tend to find myself in many situations where, say, the snare track needs to be fed to not only a ‘main drums bus’, but also a separate bus for parallel compression, and sometimes even one or two more buses for various reverb effects, etc., all to be blended in later down the line. So in these scenarios, according to Robin, Aux Sends are the way to go.
And instead of trying to keep track of when it’s ‘okay to do this’ and when it’s ‘okay to do that’, I just went all-in on Aux Sends so I don’t have to think about it. 
-J
I do use Aux Sends for all the effect-busses (e.g. saturation, reverb or parallel compression), but still prefer to have direct connections single tracks → single instrument bus (this step is the poor-man-track-folder move) → general bus (e.g. drum, bass, rhythm guitar, lead gtr, backing vocals, lead vocals) → master.
This way I can use the normal faders in mix view (I know about ‘show sends’, thanks 
).
Also I (almost) always use a session template, all the important things are already set up.
Everyone has a preferred workflow.
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