Multichannel woe

I have been trying to use reaper for some basic multichannel work but am not particularly impressed. When I select a track to have 8 channels (I often work in 7.1) I get no additional meters. (if I have 8 channels i need to see 8 meters...). There seems to be no support for surround pan. It seems to be impossible to record 8 channels into one track at once. It seems to be impossible to have a mono track. Doing a stereo track with a hard pan seems to be a klutzy compromise. It seems impossible to assign a track's master send to go to anything but 1/2 (for a 2 channel). I can add a track that itself has outputs and setup a routing through that but that seems to make the master entirely pointless for surround mixes. (where are the routing options that control the routing from a track to the master?) Another basic improvement: When adding a new audio output the default for the source drop down should not be 1/2 but it should select whatever the first unrouted channel is.

rendering multichannel file??? 

OK, I'm really newbie with Reaper... All I want to do is that; I have 6 mono files on 6 separated tracks and I want to render them in 1 multitrack files... What is the easiest way to do this operation? Whatever i did result in a multitrack (6 channels) files but with only two fisrt channel with sound on. Please help me, I'll have a lot of files to package in multitrack files and I would like to use reaper to do that. Thanks

Thanks... The animation is going a little fast but I understand that you have to record in real time. Is nt possible to simply render the files ? If not, could you explain me step by step all your routing to do what we see on your anim? Thanks again JFB

oh yeah!!! Thanks a lot for the help... I was doing almost everything correct except that my master mix was in 2 channels... That's why I had only sounds on first two channels of my six channel multitrack file when I was doing rendering! newbie I am!

Also :) i'm pretty sure that most of these things will be sorted out reasonably soon in reaper as they all have vote-able feature requests for each of the ones you have mentioned and the great thing about our devs is that they listen! They have already added so much of what we have asked for, it's been amazing! :)