The Bounce option is fine if you want to export a stereo mix of your entire project, but choosing the Export option can be much more flexible.
Track Stacks are your shortcut to quick and easy stem bouncing.
Let’s start with the basics. You’ve created a piece of music and you want to convert that into an audio file that’s playable outside of your DAW. Logic Pro calls this ‘bouncing’ a mix — a term taken from the days of tape, when it was common to send audio from a group of tape tracks to another tape track in order to free up the others, ping‑ponging audio around the tape machine before finalising to a stereo master. It describes what is essentially the same process today: taking multiple tracks and squeezing them into a single stereo file.
The other option is to ‘export’ audio. Many DAWs (and certainly Logic Pro) tend to see this in terms of exporting a single track or clip from a session. In fact, we can easily use the export process as a faster and better way to get full mixes and stems out of our project — with a little bit of setting up.
Bouncing Back
If you go to File / Bounce / Project or Section, the default settings here will bounce everything that currently plays and is active in that session within the boundary you’ve created on your timeline — that’s the yellow (or grey, if inactive) bar that runs along your timeline (Screen 1). For those starting out, PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation. The file types categorised as PCM are the ones that involve no lossy data compression, the WAV file format being the most common. The other options are data‑compressed, producing smaller files of lesser quality.
Now, for some of you this will be all you ever really need, but if you work in a professional environment, your sessions may have to be exported multiple ways, for example as stems. Stems are groups of tracks that are exported together, which combine to recreate your stereo mix. This allows for increased flexibility for other people working with your audio (a video editor, for example, might want to rebalance your vocals in a dubbing session). Commonly, you might export separate stems for drums, vocals, music, and so on. This can take a lot of time if you do it individually. In days gone by, I had to solo all the drum tracks, then perform a bounce, and then repeat the process for the next stem. On big sessions, this took up hours of my day.
Since the introduction of Track Stacks, we can set up sessions to export everything we need with just one click.
Thankfully, since the introduction of Track Stacks, we can set up sessions to export everything we need with just one click. This is also incredibly useful when you have plug‑ins on your master bus that you don’t want to be active during a particular bounce. For example, I use Sonarworks SoundID for monitoring, but I don’t want its room‑correction EQ processing my final mix, and I used to have to bypass it each time I bounced (which, painfully, I often forgot to do). If we set up a template that allows us to flexibly export audio at any stage of the mix, then we can use the Track Export function instead and do all our exporting in one go without changing anything within the project.
Summing In The Way
The first step is creating a template that uses Track Stacks. In my example, I’m mixing a documentary, but the same applies to any use case. Within my session, I’ve used Track Stack folders to group together audio tracks. To do this yourself, highlight all the tracks you want to group and right‑click a track. Go to Create Track Stack and choose to create a Summing Stack. Summing Stacks are essentially buses that are organised into folders. In contrast, a simple Folder operates as a VCA (volume control only) that doesn’t actually mix audio, and so does not have additional routing options like applying processing to all the tracks in the group. They therefore cannot be exported in the same way Summing Stacks can.
Screen 2 shows some of the routing in my documentary project. I have a Track Stack named ‘±INDOOR INTERVIEWS’, within which are further Track Stacks — one for each interviewee. Each track stack feeds its own bus, allowing for total control over each element. You can get as creative as you like, but it’s best to keep it simple so that your session is most functional for your needs and relative to what you are exporting. In my session, I’ve also set up an auxiliary track called ‘Mix Bus’. Everything in the session eventually ends up there, and from there is routed to Logic’s default Stereo Out. Now, I can place Sonarworks on the Stereo Out for monitoring, but when I export ‘Mix Bus’, it won’t process the final master because the export is taking place beforehand.
Nested Track Stacks: the ‘±INDOOR INTERVIEWS’ Summing Track Stack includes subsidiary Track Stacks for each interviewee, and feeds another Mix Bus Track Stack. Because Summing Track Stacks include audio busing, each one can easily be exported individually, and you can export multiple Track Stacks at once.
Feel The Flow
This routing does have the potential to trip you up, in that you have to remember that anything after the Track Stack you’re exporting won’t be included — including any bus processing on the Stereo Out, and possibly send effects too, depending on where they return. This is why it’s best to set up Track Stacks for all effects that relate to each group. For instance, I have a Stack for all sound design, as well as a separate one dedicated to sound design send/return effects (only), knowing that if my client wants to, they can turn down the reverb on the sound design, say.
When I compose musical scores, I have a Track Stack dedicated to orchestral elements, another for effects, one for vocals only, and so on. Creating templates with these already in place will dramatically improve your workflow later on in the project.
Sonarworks SoundID is inserted on the Stereo Out bus, but because everything in the mix goes to a Full Mix bus, I can export that without having to remember to deactivate Sonarworks. Everything I’ve highlighted here can be exported in one go (the ‘Dead VCA’ track allows me to mute any alternate mix buses I’ve set up).
Final Steps
So, we’ve got our session laid out, all we need to do now is export. Select all the Track Stacks you want to export and go to File / Export / # Tracks as Audio Files. Choose your options and click Export. Voila!
We’ve created a scenario where we can export all tracks, all stems and a final stereo mix in one fell swoop. No more sitting at the computer waiting to bounce again! You could even go one step further and create multiple mix buses that have different limiters on them, set to produce the loudness values required by different streaming services. People often ask me how I produce work on such tight deadlines — this is how!