How to save 8 tracks of live music to one file

Hi!

I am presently recording live bands on a full 8 tracks. My recordings are a full two hour session and I am trying to see if there is a way to isolate each song and save it so I can work on just that song after the session is done. Searching back later on such a long file is painful. Thanks for the help.

Chris M

Use Backup Project… to create a New Project in its own unique Folder for each of your 8 songs. These will initially all be copies of the full session with all 8 songs in each Project. Then in each of these Song Projects delete all the material before and after the desired song.

Thank you Raining, I think I get it. After I market the beginning and end of the song just drag and highlight the material before and hit the eraser and same for the material after…is how I read your method. Again thank you!

Chris M

I would use the ‘cut time’ command to get rid of the material before and after.

Adding a Marker Track to your Project can help minimize this pain.

Hi, just adding some ideas:

All of the above described methods work. But there’s different approaches.

The thing is: the audio files you recorded will be on your disk in full length. When you cut them in parts inside cubase, there will be no additional audio files on your disk.
Backup Project copies all of your project data and audio files to a new folder, so you have all your data multiple times now.

HOWEVER :blush::

You can use “Save As…” and save your copies all to the same project folder. That doesn’t copy the audio files on your disk (they’re probably large).

You can keep just one copy of all your recorded audio on disk and let cubase all the cutting do in it’s project’s logic, no need of copying the actual files or cutting them in parts.

I would recommend these steps:
– Create a project with all the stuff you have (you probably have that already).
– Create a copy with Save As (or create a new version) of the whole project where you cut the session into single tracks, just select all tracks and do Alt+X, no deleting parts or anything, and save it (Ctrl+S)
– Now do “Save As…” for every song and name them accordingly
– You can now safely open the projects of every single song and delete the already cut parts of all the other songs that you don’t need in this project.

Advantage: No actual file copying has happened, your files will probably be big and you want to avoid that. Every track has one single file sitting in the Audio-Subfolder of your project. If you just used “Save As…”, those will be referenced by every of your cubase projects – multiple projects use the same files.
You can see the actual files that are used by your project by hitting Ctrl+P (Media → Open Pool Window).

cheers

This is a totally legit approach & I would probably have recommended it in the past. But disks nowadays are large enough that I never even get close to maxing out my Project Disk (Sample Libraries are a different story). If you want to conserve diskspace by all means do what @Friede suggests. But from my perspective having multiple copies of the source files lying about is an advantage.

There’s probably a bunch of other ways to approach it too. For example you could use the Arranger Track, one Arranger Event for each song, and keep it all in one Project without deleting anything.

Yes, it’s exactly as raino says . There’s multiple ways of doing this. If you have really large projects and time could be an issue, you might consider not creating copies of all your data.
But when you have the space and it doesn’t take to long to Backup Project, you’re always on the safe side with that.

I think I’ve found another method :wink:

  1. add cycle markers for each song in the original project and name them accordingly
  2. export audio with the following settings:
    Export Range: cycle markers
    Channel Selection: multiple (and select all the 8 channel you want to export
    Naming Scheme: “CycleMrkrNm” + “ChannelName”

Then you can either select all the cycle markers and simple export as audio files to a location of your liking, and then create new projects and import those files, or you could set “After Export: create new project” and go through your cycle markers one by one and have Cubase create a new project with just the song’s tracks for you.

Hi,

I would use any method to isolate the songs (Cycle Markers + Cut or Backup Project + Cut). In the new project, I would use the Bounce Selection to make sure, there is the given (in use) part of the Audio files only in the project. If you would keep the original long Audio files, you could come across performance issues.

Thank you everyone. I am so new at this still. It’s hard to soak it all in. I should mention I am only running Cubase 12 le.
Chris M

Then the method I suggested most likely isn’t an option for you, I think it needs Artist or Pro…