I don’t think that it is possible in Ableton.
When you record MIDI or Audio you get separate lanes. (If you are cycle recording when you do this then they are actually all part of the same file. But if it is a different time you have started to record, they are different files. But they still show up as “lanes”, like sub tracks inside of the main track.) This doesn’t happen with automation, so it is destructive.
If you want to have separate takes of automation, then you can create a separate MIDI track on which you record the CCs for the automation. This will then be just like recording any MIDI, then you send the MIDI track to the destination where you want it to be automation.
Back in the day, automation and CC was one and the same thing, all you had were CCs. The reason for automation was that CCs only allow 127 values (and 127 different CCs), so the granularity wasn’t as fine as what is possible if you map those CCs to a more granular scale. With MIDI 2.0 this limitation will no-longer be there, so going back to treating automation as as just CC data should allow an easy transition to comping the automation as well as the notes, or audio.
This suggests a solution where by Audio tracks always accept CC input as well as Audio, without having to create a separate MIDI track to do so. And if you are going to allow CCs then you might as well allow the Notes as well, so a combined track with a separate lanes for MIDI and Audio makes a lot of sense.
But then it is convenient to treat the Automation separately, so that’s 3 sub regions of a track. Audio, Note and CC(i.e. Automation). It’s not so different than what we have now. And the UI wouldn’t really need to change. The difference would be that when you focus on Automation, it could be expanded to separate lanes one could comp. MIDI notes would just be another region, just like automation.
The added benefit of this would be that the Audio could also be treated like VC and used for modulation, MIDI and audio could reside on the same track.
To make this happen seamlessly, there is no reason to restrict the input and output of any track to any other. There is no reason for a “Track” to not simply be a Node in a DAG. (Directed Acyclic Graph)
So that is really the top of my Wishlist. But I don’t expect it in C12. Tacks are Nodes in a DAG, so Groups, FX (which are already the same thing) and Audio, and MIDI, are just how you use them, and the expectation for which part of the Node is the primary focus of the UI.
Oops, I Nerd-ed to far I think.