Track freezing
Print a track to audio, give the engine a rest, and come back to the original any time.
Freezing renders a whole track, or a whole group, to one audio clip and takes the original out of the processing graph. The instrument, the effects and their automation stop costing anything, and what you hear is the same performance printed to stereo. The original is kept, dimmed and marked with a snowflake, and Unfreeze brings it back whenever you want to change a note or a knob.
When to use it
Freeze when a dense synth part or a long chain of effects pushes the engine toward its limit, when a part is finished and you want to stop touching it, or when you want to edit the sound as audio: reverse a phrase, chop it, or feed it to the sampler. Freezing a drum group prints the whole kit with its child tracks and internal routing as one clip.
Controls
Freeze track
Right-click a track header, or use its … button, and choose Freeze track. With effects prints the instrument, the clips and the track’s effects, including every automation lane. Without effects prints the same without the track’s own effects, so you can keep processing the audio with the rack later. In both cases the new track gets an empty rack; effects are never copied onto it, and the original keeps its rack for unfreezing.
The rendered track
The render is a regular stereo audio track directly below the original, in the same group and color, starting at bar one. It keeps the original’s level, pan, mute, solo, sends and channel automation. Treat it like any other track: edit, add effects, automate, route, duplicate or freeze it again. Progress shows while it renders, with Cancel freeze if you change your mind; cancelling leaves the project unchanged.
Frozen originals
A frozen track’s clips dim and its controls are disabled: no recording, auditioning, monitoring or control edits until it is unfrozen. It cannot be deleted while frozen; the render can be deleted at any time and the original restored afterwards. Freeze and Unfreeze are each one undo step.
Unfreeze track
Available on the frozen original or on a frozen child. The original returns to the graph and the rendered track stays exactly as it is, with every edit you made to it. Both will play, so use Mute and Solo to choose what you hear.
What cannot be frozen as one
A few routings have no single replacement without changing another track’s sound, and the menu explains why: sends arriving from outside the track, a child that sends out of its group or drives another track’s sidechain, and a parent whose children are already frozen. Freeze the sending or child tracks instead, or unfreeze the children first.
Tips
- A freeze captures the performance as it is. Later changes to tempo, groove, the chord track or a sidechain source do not update the audio; unfreeze and freeze again.
- Choose Without effects when the chain is still in flux and With effects when the sound is final; the second saves the most engine load.
- Frozen originals are left out of the export’s track picker and do not extend the song’s length.