Capture a show, then mix it again without the band.

There is no channel picker to fill in before you record. Every patched input and MAIN are armed by default, and you opt a channel out rather than opting channels in — a channel with nothing patched to it records nothing worth keeping, so the console leaves it out of the derivation without changing what you asked for: patch something into it later and it arms again, with no extra step. Aux and matrix channels are not armed unless you ask for them.

Patched means the signal actually arrives, not that the patch list says it should. The console asks the audio graph whether a link runs from the source into that strip’s input, and a strip whose patch has not been made — a stagebox that has not turned up, a device the graph has not offered yet — is left out of the take even though the desk shows it patched. That distinction was bought the hard way: a take of eighty-four tracks in which one channel’s two files were 94-byte headers, found the next morning.

So the console says what it is not recording, once, at the moment the take starts and the arm set becomes unchangeable: the channels it left out are named in the console’s log, with the reason — a declared source with no link into the strip’s input. They are also missing from the armed count you can read while the take runs, and the take itself carries no track for them. A running take reports the omissions it started with and does not re-derive them, so linking a strip mid-show never makes it look as though a take could have carried it.

Each armed channel is captured at two points by default — its raw input, taken straight after the trim, and its post-fader signal — so a re-mix afterwards has both the untouched source and what you actually pushed to the house that night. An input channel is offered a third point, pre-fader, and the three are a set rather than a choice: a channel can record pre and post fader at the same time. A bus master is offered one point, post-fader, and that is a stated fact about a bus rather than an oversight.

Which taps a channel records is decided when the take starts. Changing the set while a take is running moves nothing and costs nothing — it is a decision about the files the next take will open.

The channel set is fixed for the whole take. Arming or unarming a channel while a take is running does nothing to that take — the set was decided the moment it started, on purpose: a capture that could gain a track mid-show is one where nobody can say afterwards what the first ten minutes actually held.

Every take that finished recording is listed, newest first, by when it started and how long it ran. There is no upload and no import — the only way a take enters the library is by being recorded — and there is deliberately no delete yet: erasing a multitrack take safely, while a render or a soundcheck might hold it open, is real work the console has not done, and a delete button that is not safe is worse than no delete button.

The files themselves are plain WAV — RF64 once a track passes 4 GB, ordinary RIFF WAV below it, and every reader treats the two the same — one mono 32-bit float file per track, at the rate the graph was running when the take was recorded.

One file per track means one file per leg, so a stereo channel contributes two, sharing a channel and a tap between them. Each one names its side in the take's own record, left or right, so nothing downstream has to infer a stereo pair from the order the files happen to be listed in. The file names stay the track number and the tap — ch09.post-fader.wav — because that is what stops a DAW laying the wrong tap under the vocal; the side is in the record beside them. Takes recorded before the side was written down do not carry it.

A channel that was armed but never carried a buffer records a file with a header and nothing in it. The take is not refused for it and the track is not quietly dropped: the take counts how many of its tracks are known empty, and separately how many it cannot speak for at all, because a take made before the console measured this carries no answer rather than a zero.

An empty track is not the same thing as a take that lost frames. A channel with no signal path attached is skipped by the audio thread entirely, so nothing was dropped and the take honestly reports no drops. Two facts, and neither implies the other.

The consequence you will meet is at soundcheck: a channel whose track in the take is empty is left on its live input rather than switched to silence, and the console names which channels those were. If that leaves nothing at all engaged, play refuses rather than running a transport no channel is listening to.

Both counts are on the take where you choose it. A take with known-empty tracks is tagged in record red with how many — 2 EMPTY — because that is the one that costs you a soundcheck, and a take whose tracks were never measured carries a dashed UNMEASURED instead, in a neutral colour: it is a take written before the console measured this, and painting it red would make every old take look broken. Dropped frames are a third tag again, and none of the three implies another.

Hiding an empty track would be worse than carrying an honest one. It is how you find out about a channel that recorded nothing from the library, rather than from a silent strip at the next soundcheck.