Internal input ports / effects loop

Cantabile
1

I want to pre-process a guitar sound before sending it to an audio path in the Background Rack. Since guitar effects vary from song to song, I don’t want to put every possible effect in a chain, but rather to create an ‘internal’ input port. For each song that uses the guitar input, I can either create a direct rout to the internal input, or send things through effects processing first. Kind of like this –

INPUT A (from USB audio) ------> {effects chain} ------> BGND RACK INPUT

Right now, I’m doing that by creating an unassigned Input port with loopback –

INPUT A ------> effects chain ------> loopback:BR INPUT

BR INPUT ---------------------------> Background Rack

The way I’m doing it works fine, with tthree minor drawbacks:

  • The name “loopback:BR INPUT” is long, enough so that the actual port name is truncated in the routing view.
  • The input itself (BR INPUT) shows up in every Routing diagram, even though it is only used by the Background Rack.
  • It would seem that there is a 1-audio-cycle delay for the loopback; in my case 3ms. (Is this true for unassigned inputs?)

Is there another way to create a general-purpose internal-only input?