Synth freezing and audio tracks

[DSL]

Hi friends,

I wonder if you can help me get to grips with something...

I've been using CbB for well over a year now, and in many regards I feel I've learned a lot about it. However, there is one area that I don't really understand, which is freezing synths. I use a mixture of external synths and internal. As I don't want to have excessive CPU load, by the time I'm ready to mix I freeze the internal synths. I want to be able to work on these tracks just like audio tracks, but because they're frozen if I add plugins they wont work; so what I've been doing is copying the audio clips onto new tracks and muting the originals. I'm pretty sure that's not the best way to do it! I thought there was maybe a way to bounce (render) the synth tracks so that they behave exactly the same as the other audio tracks, but I can't seem to work out how.

If there is (as I suspect) a more elegant solution than my workaround, please will you point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

Dave

[Lord Tim]

Ehh, that's how I do it if I want to work on frozen tracks just like audio tracks and it works fine, although I Archive the originals rather than Muting them to make sure they're entirely taken offline rather than just muted.

Another way you could do it is selecting your synth (both MIDI and Softsynth out tracks) and use Bounce to Tracks and then archive the originals, which more or less achieves the same thing, but honestly it's not a real lot faster than the Freeze / move you're already doing.

Edited February 5, 2023 by Lord Tim

[scook]

By default, freeze applies and disables the FX rack/PC. One could change the defaults or re-enable the FX rack/PC after freezing.

Copying the audio to a new track is a way which preserves the original frozen track.

Alternately one could 

• select the instrument/audio track associated with the synth
• bounce to tracks(s) to create the audio on a new track,
  • set source to tracks
  • verify the synth source track
  • click OK
• archive the original track and
• disconnect the synth.

These steps effectively reproduce the freeze+copy+archive process.

[DSL]

Thanks chaps!

I had a look at the freeze options and saw what you meant about changing the default so that the FX rack was unaffected; that was my biggest issue. I'll give this some more thought.

Cheers,

Dave

 

[Lord Tim]

One big caveat of treating frozen tracks just like audio tracks is that if you do any edits on it at all, and then decide "hey maybe I should try a different synth patch", when you unfreeze it, all of those edits will be lost. Copying (or bouncing) your frozen clip to a new track will give you a good safety net in case you want to try out other options.