Userguide | Bitwig

Bouncing to Audio

The concept of an audio bounce may be familiar. Sometimes called an export or render in other contexts, a bounce is a consolidated audio version of some part of your project. In this case, we want to investigate bouncing a note clip.

By right-clicking a note clip, a couple of bounce options are listed in the context menu. (These same options also appear in the Edit menu.)

The Bounce Function

The simple Bounce function presents a dialog box.

The Source choices refer to different places in the track's signal flow, and you get to select which point you would like the audio to come from.

The options include:

Pre-FX: The raw audio signal from the primary instrument's output.
Pre-Fader: The audio signal after the track's device chain but before the track's volume setting is applied.
Post-Fader: The audio signal after the track's device chain and volume setting.
Custom: A special menu of options that includes every top-level signal junction in the track, including from within the device chain.
In this example, the instrument track in question has three top-level devices: Drum Machine, Delay-2, and Bit-8. Selecting one of these options chooses the audio output of that device for the bounce.

Three additional parameters follow:

Bit depth: The resolution of the bounced audio file.
Dither: A toggle for whether shaping is applied for the selected bit depth.
Real-time: A toggle to bounce at the actual speed (and time duration) of the selection. This setting is necessary if you are bouncing external hardware, etc.

After making your selections, click Ok to bounce the audio onto a new track.

If you want a standard pre-fader bounce, you can also click and drag a clip while holding ALT (SHIFT+CTRL on Mac).

The Bounce in Place Function and Hybrid Tracks

The Bounce in place function is similar to the Bounce function with two key differences.

First, it presents no dialog box, taking the audio output from the primary instrument (Pre-FX).

Second, it replaces the clip you are bouncing with the bounce itself.

	Note
	Since Bounce in place deletes your source clip, it is a good practice to copy the clip (perhaps to the Clip Launcher) before using this function.

	Note
	When using Bounce in place on a metaclip within a group track (see Meta Clips and Group Tracks in the Arranger), the newly bounced clip is placed on the group track's internal master track instead of replacing the source clip. Accordingly, the group track will now ignore its component tracks for that section, outputting only the audio of that bounced clip.

Since this was the only note clip on the track, Bitwig Studio has converted it from an instrument track to an audio track while preserving the entire device chain.

If there were other note clips on the track, it would have been converted from an instrument track to a hybrid track.

Since hybrid tracks allow both audio and note clips to be present, the Detail Editor Panel now has its Audio Editorand Note Editor buttons to keep things straight. These buttons (and the panel) work as they did when we first saw them in layered editing mode (see Layered Editing Mode). Otherwise, hybrid tracks work the same as instrument and audio tracks.

Note

To enable this workflow of hybrid tracks, virtually every Bitwig device passes thru signals that are not its focus. For example, normal note effect and instrument devices pass thru audio signals that reach them. And instrument and audio effect devices send on the note signals they receive, as following audio devices or modulators may take advantage of them.

The primary exception to this rule are devices using The Grid, which have some routing parameters for defining their "thru" behaviors (see Grid Devices and Thru Signals).

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