Total recall means that all your mixer settings like levels, pan positions, eq settings, FX settings and all are saved together with the actual project you're working on. After some time this will seem natural to you and you won't worry about it anymore. You could mix one song at a time, you couldn't just hop to another project inbetween, because your mixer settings would be all wrong, and you had to reset everything. With a digital console, this is better, but you still have to load the settings for your mixer, your outboard FX and all manually. You can even save several different mixer settings for one song and do a quick compare between your mixes.
Most software packages allow extensive automation of the mixdown.
You can record changes in the volume, pan, eq, FX-processors. Some software packages have a mixer window that looks a lot like a hardware mixer. It has faders, knobs and the like. This is easy to learn if you have worked with hardware mixers before, because everything works similar. Other packages don't have that, but feature clickable volume envelope curves right on the track graphics.