[JFreak]

No confusion once you think about it a minute. Analog days will teach you. Consider that "channel" is signal flow and "track" is what has fader.

Now a longer explanation.

Back in the days of analog consoles and magnetic tape, the signal flow was pretty often unchanged from session to session. Meaning that preamp one went to magnetic tape track one, was routed back to fader one, and this all was called "channel" which fed buss or output.

Sometimes you wanted to use something more fancy to -say- lead vocal track, so you took your favourite preamp and connected it to the signal flow, which in PT is done simply by choosing different input instead of hardwiring your setup again. As you can see, in normal situation (no external preamps) the preamp one would have been hardwired to fader one.

So, again, "channel" is about signal flow and "track" is the fader that controls what you have.

i do not care if you shout "hey the kick channel is not working" to your tech or "the kick track is suddenly empty" or whatever, but this is the difference of the two concepts. Sometimes the "channel" is more complicated than internal wiring of console preamp to console fader, but maybe you can at least agree that "channel strip" is anything between inputting the track and sending the output to a buss or output.