Freezing benefit question

[jkoseattle]

I am getting dropouts all the time now that my piece is 4 minutes of 30 instruments with effects and plugins all over the place. I know that freezing tracks frees up resources, but it is time consuming. Which brings me to this question: (I'm making an assumption here that effect processing is the biggest memory hog that freezing helps with.) Given two tracks with roughly the same effects on them and both coming from the same manufacturer's library, would a track with more notes provide me more benefit than a track with fewer notes? I also have many expression envelopes in these tracks, some with more, some with less or even none. Does that get me more benefit if I freeze those kinds of tracks?  

I really don't have almost ANY tracks that I am working with less and can freeze and forget. So whichever ones I decide to freeze there is no guarantee I won't need to un-freeze it at any time. It's hard to predict. Which is why short of laboriously freezing every track I'm not right now working with and then un-freezing all the time and freezing again etc., I'd like to just freeze enough tracks to let me keep working, accepting a kind of trade-off. So I want to freeze the tracks that will get me more bang for my buck. I might save a whole lot more by freezing the 1st violins, but they play a LOT, so are way more likely to be needed again soon. Are they also going to save me more though? Whereas the harp only comes in a couple times and I doubt I'll mess with it much.  But if I freeze it, am I not saving that much because it's seldom used?

[John Vere]

Bottom line is if you work with large projects with a lot of effects you have 2 choices. 
Freeze or purchase a computer that is capable. 
Freezing takes only a few seconds of your time, if that time is valuable to you then upgrade the computer. 

[David Baay]

What buffer size are you running? Presumably you don't have to keep it low to allow real-time recording at this point and can raise it to rduce the CPU load.  By the time your FX load is getting that high,  you should be largely done with composing/editing/arranging so that you can freeze the synths with their automation, leaving only track/bus FX active. If you're still working on the composition and tweaking synth sounds/automation, you should try disabling non-critical FX until you're really ready for the mixing/mastering stages.

I'm sympathetic to the tendency to work on all of the 'stages' of a project in parallel and over-produce individual parts and tracks before the composition is complete as I'm frequently guilty of this myself. But my compositions tend to be sparse enough that I can afford it. If you're working in a musical genre that has a lot more going on with a lot of heavy-weight synths, you need to be more disciplined about separating the stages and getting all your composing/arranging done using raw instrument sounds (and maybe lighter-weight stand-ins for some of them initially) with only the basic FX that you would find on a physical console strip, and using send FX on buses where possible; you shouldn't have a lot of "tracks with roughly the same effects on them".

[Robert McClellan]

First off, I would say (as has already been stated), check your buffers and slide it closer to safe mode. 
 

Secondly, I have a pretty fast high-end computer and even with higher track counts I will freeze things for two different reasons. The obvious reason is to save on CPU usage, the not so obvious reason is to innocent mark those tracks as tracks that I have got to a point where they sound like I want them in context with the mix. This keeps me from going back to them later and kind of check them off as done. 

There are some negative side effects to this as well. But not anything major, just keep this in mind. if a track has been frozen any adjustments that you make to that track from that point forward if you were to unfreeze that track would be reversed. so if you’re going to make any adjustments to a frozen track, unfreeze it first and then make your adjustments and refreeze.
 

That helps!

[jkoseattle]

On 5/11/2024 at 7:52 AM, John Vere said:

Bottom line is if you work with large projects with a lot of effects you have 2 choices. 
Freeze or purchase a computer that is capable. 
Freezing takes only a few seconds of your time, if that time is valuable to you then upgrade the computer. 

A freeze of a single track takes 30-45 seconds apiece. I'm gathering from the responses here that automation is the big resource hog. Also, disabling FX isn't proving to save me that much.

[jkoseattle]

23 hours ago, David Baay said:

What buffer size are you running? Presumably you don't have to keep it low to allow real-time recording at this point and can raise it to rduce the CPU load.  By the time your FX load is getting that high,  you should be largely done with composing/editing/arranging so that you can freeze the synths with their automation, leaving only track/bus FX active. If you're still working on the composition and tweaking synth sounds/automation, you should try disabling non-critical FX until you're really ready for the mixing/mastering stages.

I'm sympathetic to the tendency to work on all of the 'stages' of a project in parallel and over-produce individual parts and tracks before the composition is complete as I'm frequently guilty of this myself. But my compositions tend to be sparse enough that I can afford it. If you're working in a musical genre that has a lot more going on with a lot of heavy-weight synths, you need to be more disciplined about separating the stages and getting all your composing/arranging done using raw instrument sounds (and maybe lighter-weight stand-ins for some of them initially) with only the basic FX that you would find on a physical console strip, and using send FX on buses where possible; you shouldn't have a lot of "tracks with roughly the same effects on them".

Buffer size is slid all the way over to safe, as you're right I don't need real-time recording snappiness at this stage. And still it's bad. I've learned that disabling FX doesn't save me that much, I'm gathering it's the automation because I'm using a lot more expression pedal on these tracks.

For the official record, when I say "tracks with roughly the same effects on them" I'm referring mostly to EQ, but as I said, I don't think the FX is the problem as much.

My compositions long to be sparse, but this one sure ain't.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/180povCzKllLuW_yKcdDX7mldcaVfg1Cw/view?usp=sharing

 

Edited May 12 by jkoseattle

[57Gregy]

I still operate as if this was a computer from 2002; Bounce, archive. Bounce, archive and so on.
Once everything is audioized (if that's a word), I save it with a different name and work on that project.
I don't use effects until I'm done recording. I seldom even use soft synths until I finished tracking, using the Yamaha keyboard's sounds instead. If they're not good enough for the song (rarely, I'm a simple man), I will search for a soft synth that has what I want.