I’ve got a big pile of old Projects that have long been in need of being audio archived. Of course, since my middle name is Procrastination that pile remains - but I’ve vowed to get it under control.
So I’m wondering what’s the smartest way to go about this for a bunch of Projects. Batch processing multiple Projects would be great, but I’m pretty sure that can’t be done. The closer to open a Project & hit a Key Command the better.
Specifically I’m thinking of rendering each source Track both with and without Inserts applied. Kinda on the fence on whether to render the Send FX channels - reverbs & the like. It’s really a tradeoff between time, completeness and the potential of needing it in the future.
Also my inclination is to have all the audio files for a Project start and stop at the same time. This will of course generate many files that are mostly silent, which is fine & expected. But I’m wondering if it makes more sense to vary the length of the audio to omit any silence at the end of the file - so every Track starts at zero and ends when it has no remaining audio.
I’m a little old school when it comes to exporting stems - I could never let it be automated. I listen to each song after I’m done anyway which takes up most of my time.
But I usually export my drums and percussion as groups. Lead Vocals dry but keep any processing decisions like EQ and compression. Doing everything with and without inserts is way over the top for me. I’ve rarely had to go back that far into a mix.
If I have a complex backing vocal scenario I’ll export that as a group. The rest is track by track with effects, so usually a stereo interleaved track for each element.
If I have any tricked out effects that will be a separate stem.
Traditionally I’ve always moved my right locator if a track ended early in the song in order to save disc space. But since disc space has gotten so cheap over the years I’ve been getting lazy and just print everything with the same start and finish.
I try to do this as soon as a mix is done so I don’t end up with a backlog of songs that I want to make stems for. But, I too am also a procrastinator so, right now I have a backlog of songs that I want to make stems for.
All that said I think you can automate exporting each track in Cubase these days. I’ve never experimented with it. I’m sure someone else will give advice for that.