In this article James Richmond takes a first look at Auto Bounce by Tom Salta, which provides an effective means to automate the often laborious process of track bouncing and stem creation from Logic Pro.

Bounce to Disk is certainly an advantage of working in a DAW but it can also be time consuming and frustrating. Also, gone are the days where we all have assistants to do the work for us so the tedious process of creating mix, stem and multitrack bounces is a job that must be done but how many of us actually do it entirely? I don’t know about you but there have been times when faced with hours sitting in front of progress bars waiting for each bounce to complete I have started, done an hours or so of it then taken a break fully intending to come back to it but then… not.

Auto-Bounce is an automation tool was born out of the real-world needs and frustrations of its creators. In the last few months of using it it has felt like a virtual assistant, taking over these mundane, but necessary, tasks, leaving me free to get on with other things.

Auto-Bounce is a collaboration between composer Tom Salta and software developer David Molnar of Renegade Soundplay. Tom Salta realised that the bouncing process in Logic Pro was time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to errors especially when dealing with stems, multitracks and mixes. Auto-Bounce simplifies this process, allowing users to focus on their creative work rather than getting bogged down in the technicalities of bouncing.

The Problem It Solves

In my daily work I need to be constantly bouncing to disk; all sorts of material be it stems, multitracks or entire mixes. This week, for example, I mixed and mastered a six song mini-album where I needed to bounce the following:

• Complete mixes of all six songs

• Stems of all six songs

• Multitracks of all six songs for archiving purposes.

• One audio file of all six tracks in the album running order in the style of a DJ set.

How it Works

Auto-Bounce allows me to do it in a fraction of that time. This is the main advantage of this type of application; it gives you valuable time back in your day where you would otherwise be sitting about waiting for one bounce to finish so you can start the next.

Auto-Bounce acts as a remote controller of Logic Pro. There is a bit of configuration necessary to set the onscreen elements necessary for Auto-Bounce to work plus a few key commands that need to be set or imported into Logic. You can also configure your own but it is necessary for Logic and Auto-Bounce to be configured with the same key commands for it to work. I used the defaults as specified in the Auto-Bounce documentation, which is excellent.

Once this is done you decide what you want to bounce out. Using the example above you can see the six songs arranged so that they run end to end, with a lead out and lead in for each, in the style of a DJ mix. I want to create seven audio files in total, one that has all six songs and individual audio files for each song.

Having configured Logic as per instructions it is simply a matter of opening Auto-Bounce where you are greeted with the Auto-Bounce user interface.

Select Scan sees Auto-Bounce begin its initial scan.

Once the Logic project is scanned you can start to create jobs.

The first job I created was Whole Mix which includes everything in the cycle range as shown in the Logic project (1 1 1 1 to 998 1 1 1 ). Clicking on Edit next to Mix name allows you to configure naming for the job.

Creating a second job for the Individual Tracks which this time will be bounced as Stems allows me to select one of the three Stem modes. In this instance Vari-Start&End is the most appropriate as I want each audio file to be the length of each track’s audio region plus its tail. If creating multitracks or stems for archiving or remixing then one of the other two modes Static or Vari-End would be likely used instead.

In this instance I configured Auto-Bounce to name each audio file after the track name but as with the Mix option you have a lot of different naming options possible.

There is also quite a lot of control over bounce format but do note that Auto-Bounce does not pass audio, so these options reflect what is possible in Logic Pro. Once you are happy with the job creation all you need to do is click the blue BOUNCE icon and let Auto-Bounce do what it does. 

In this instance the whole process took under 10 minutes to bounce out 32 minutes of music as an entire mix and as individual audio files. To do this manually would be considerably longer and larger or more complicated projects would take even longer. 

Time saving is one advantage but the convenience of this application means I am more likely to archive my projects as audio so if/when I need to come back to them in the future I have everything rendered as audio.

Whilst Logic does have some rudimentary bounce and exporting features it doesn’t come close to the capability of Auto-Bounce. Vari-Start&End, in particular, is a film composer’s dream.

Conclusion

I’ve been using Auto-Bounce for a few months now and it has become central to my workflow when using Logic Pro. Tom Salta and David Molnar have created a genuinely useful and transformative application that streamlines my workflow, removing minutes or hours a days of laborious and boring work that frankly could be spent doing more interesting things. This functionality should be standard in Logic Pro (and other DAWs) and now I’ve used it I will struggle to go back to the old way of doing things.

Auto-Bounce is currently discounted from $299 to $199 for a single seat license which may perhaps raise a few eyebrows but having used it and seen how powerful it is I think that the price is justified. There is a 14 day free trial if you wish to see for yourself and I suggest that you do.

Pros

• Time saver and workflow streamliner

• Easy to use

• Doesn’t pass audio so non-destructive

Cons

• Some will balk at the cost but how much is your time worth?