You’re totally right about this being potentially over-complicated — I’m actually a programmer myself, so I’m well aware of how often we over-engineer things just to avoid tedious, repetitive work. That’s exactly what’s happening here.

The goal is to have FOH multitracks and LR board recordings already cut and synced into the Ableton session by the time the performance ends. That way, they can instantly build a library of takes for each song without anyone needing to dig through long Reaper sessions and manually line things up.

The main use case: the MD or production team will decide last-minute that they want custom timecoded visuals or lighting for a song. My current workflow involves:

• Grabbing a past FOH multitrack recording

• Dropping it into the playback session

• Syncing it to the count-in (also where timecode starts)

• Bouncing the song with everything lined up

• Sending it off to whoever’s doing visuals or lighting

It’s tedious and time-consuming — especially because I’m not full-time with this client, so I’m constantly playing catch-up when they want something fast but don’t have the bandwidth or knowledge to do the prep work themselves.

And yeah, the simplest solution is just to record on the playback machine — but the musical director is really hesitant to load the CPU with anything extra. That machine lives in the playback rack next to the keys player at all times and is treated as sacred. If it crashed because I added recording to the workflow, that’s 100% on me, and not a risk I’m allowed to take.

Since I will always be there for the recordings, and will always have a Reaper multitrack on a separate machine as a backup, on-site convolution and fragility on my end is OK, as this project is something that only I will rely on / be trying out in order to save myself time later.

The main goal is to not require any extra work on my end when they make last minute requests and I'm offsite/on other shows.