Hi Tallisman,
Great thread. I love the concept of BEAR, but I found some issues with the current version. I made a new version (BEAR 2.0), which is a bit more involved, but should address a wider variety of situations without hurting the original functionality (as far as I know). Here is a list of the issues I ran into with BEAR 1.0 and how I addressed them in BEAR 2.0:
PROBLEM 1: Doesn't gracefully support BEARing a folder track that receives audio from its children.
SOLUTION: BEAR 2.0 mutes children of folder tracks and then unmutes then when they are unBEARed.
PROBLEM 2: Stem Rendering can be slow(er) if FX are enabled on other unselected tracks.
SOLUTION: Remember the mute state of all unselected tracks, mute them during stem rendering, then restore their mute states after stem rendering is complete. NOTE: this saved a ton of time in my testing.
PROBLEM 3: Doesn't gracefully support locked items; can even cause Reaper to go into an infinite loop and crash.
SOLUTION: Unlock items before stem rendering when BEARing and before deleting the stem render when unBEARing.
I also made one other change which is more a matter of personal preference. Rather than physically deleting stem render audio files during unBEAR, I changed the command to simply remove the item from the project. I see this as a little safer method in case you accidentally unBEAR a track that was never BEARed to begin with.
To help keep the disk clean, I created a new macro that is also included here called "Clean/Save/Render". The idea is that when you hit a point where you are happy with everything and ready to move on, you hit this macro to review anything that may need deleting, save your project, and render in one motion.
Of course, if you prefer to just stick with the physical delete, feel free to change that one command back. Let me know what you think. If you find it useful, feel free to replace your current BEAR 1.0 with 2.0.
Custom Actions & Key maps: The easy List and Links
Linear Mode
