Those of you running host based DAW systems have probably run into the processing limitations host at one time or another. This often happens when enabling plug-ins because the most powerful ones (like reverb) tend to eat up a lot of your processing power. One alternative is to print the effect to the disk with the track for which it is intended. This works fine, and the process is not destructive. You can go back later and redo it (provided you keep the original tracks on your drive) if you find that some tweaking needs to be done. But users complain that this poses too much of an inconvenience. Short of buying a more powerful computer there doesn’t seem to be an alternative, but there is a partial workaround.
Instead of printing both the effect and the source track to disk together just print only the effect. You now have your original source track in its original form, and a separate recorded track of the effect for that track. This gives you an easy way to adjust the most common, which is simply the ratio of effect to the dry signal. Since these are now separate tracks you can adjust the level balance easily throughout the rest of your project. Obviously if you need to go in and adjust other things you may have to print the track again, but you’d be surprised how much flexibility this arrangement gives you. Maybe a reverb time is a little too long. You can adjust it and print the track again, but if you pull out a little midrange EQ on that track you will find the apparent decay time seems shorter even though the initial level doesn’t change too much. Reverb is one effect that generally uses way more resources running in realtime on your computer than it does simply existing as a separate track, so assuming you have enough tracks this is a great technique to free up your computer’s resources for other things.