Bouncing external hardware tracks to audio

What are people's preferred workflows if you're sequencing a bunch of hardware and want to bounce the whole track (or individual tracks i guess) to audio. With another DAW i'd just record the external audio into an empty track.

Options i can think of:
1. record audio into a clip using the sampler on an empty track- havent tried this yet, but i guess it should work?
2. record into a separate app/device - cant use ASIO at the same time as Maschine though and there will be syncing issues(Hit record in DAW, then press start in Maschine)
3. Start DAW an run Maschine as a plugin. record audio into empty tracks. Does midi output still work in this case or would i have to route it through the DAW?
4. bounce patterns individually using the sampler, (this is*usually* how i work) but eg. doesn't capture effect trails that span pattern boundaries, so not ideal
5. ???

Anything I'm missing?

My honest hope is that NI bite the bullet and accept that linear audio workflow is essential to many people's workflows, and provide support for that (even if the implementation is just a streamlined way of setting up track-length clips)

 

use option 1, but use the Audio module instead of the Sampler...

 

just tried this and it actually works pretty much perfectly. There's potential for the clip length not to match the recording length... and ending up with unintended looping, but this seems by far the easiest approach. Hurray for clips!