Freeze Tracks and MIDI

[Bobby Thistle]

Greetings...

After a long time away from doing anything related to music, I've managed to find some time to get back into it.  That being said, I'm still a newb at using vst instruments in my projects.

I've been looking around for some in depth info about freezing tracks to cut back on cpu usage.  So far I've been using soft synths only and they're all MIDI tracks.  Looking around in the reference guide I find that it seems to only be talking about audio tracks.  Is there any significant benefit from freezing vst MIDI tracks as well?  Does a vst soft synth instrument use a lot of cpu, even if there's no effects to it?

Much appreciated.

[David Baay]

Aside from any internal FX processing a soft synth may offer, the CPU load a soft synth imposes depends on the synthesis method and the number of "voices" (polyphony and timbres) used. A multitimbral synth that produces polyphonic output of sustained/evolving sounds using physical modeling or actual "synthesis" of complex soundss from elemental waveforms will use more CPU than a simple monophonic sample-based instrument playing one-shot samples like drums.  And there's a lot of ground in between those two extrames.

For those more complex "synths", freezing  (i.e. rendeirng the output to a WAV file and 'turning off' the synth) can reduce the CPU load  significantly. Freezing may also unload some or all of the synth code and sample content from memory, and sample-based synths can be pretty memory-intensive.  You also have the option of freezing the synth ouput without freezing track FX - right-click the freeze button.

[Lord Tim]

Just to be clear, usually you'll find your MIDI tracks are driving a softsynth which is connected to an audio track, so when you say it's only talking about audio tracks, it actually still is, except that they're being played by a MIDI track. You won't actually be freezing the MIDI track as such, you'll be freezing the audio track of the synth it's playing.

You'll see when I click the Freeze icon on the MIDI track that's playing the TTS-1 instrument, they both freeze, and the frozen audio appears in the audio track that has TTS-1 on it:

[Bobby Thistle]

Thanks for your explanations.  I guess I should have included the info about what synths I'm using.

SampleTank 4 and Addictive Drums 2.  I'm guessing that these are "sample" instruments that will use up a lot of cpu and memory resources ?

[A Tolerable Quietude]

I usually start freezing tracks when I start to notice dropouts or other signs that my system is being overtaxed.  If everything sounds fine to you, then I wouldn't bother.

FYI, you can see what system resources are being used in your project and how close you are to maxing them out with the performance module.

[Bobby Thistle]

1 hour ago, Eric S. said:

I usually start freezing tracks when I start to notice dropouts or other signs that my system is being overtaxed.  If everything sounds fine to you, then I wouldn't bother.

FYI, you can see what system resources are being used in your project and how close you are to maxing them out with the performance module.

Thanks for this, Eric... very much appreciated for sure.

I have to say that I have never gotten to the point where I've noticed dropouts in anything I've done.  I'm a very simple creator and have never had any problems.  At the most I'm only using 5 or 6 virtual instruments within my songs.  Now, at least, I know what to look for and what to do if ever I do start having any trouble.