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Freezing Tracks


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I regularly freeze tracks to conserve resources while I'm recording, and I had always just blindly assumed that the frozen track is exactly the same as the normal track. However, I just noticed that one of my frozen tracks is panned differently than the unfrozen track. This scares me because I have mixed down a few songs with frozen tracks in them expecting everything to be a-ok.

So my questions are (1) should there be a difference in the frozen track, and if so what types of differences should I expect? The SONAR manual doesn't seem to indicate that there should be any difference (2) does anyone else export final mixdowns with tracks that have been frozen, or is that just bad practice?

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It's an option available in some DAW's (although it's possible via workaround in almost all of them) that will quickly render a track or mixer insert or whatever to audio, this is done when you're comfortable with a certain element or portion of a song (you like one instrument, for example, but want to keep working on another in the same area of the song). By rendering the "Finished" portion to audio, every time that you listen/work on that part, instead of sending midi to VST's, then rendering the audio through the effects, it can simply play the audio (which sounds the same as what would be rendered). This can really cut down on the CPU load for a given area.

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With a high-end computer, there's no need to freeze tracks imo. A large amount of RAM and an Intel i7 processor (extreme edition and overclocked for purists) would be able to handle any DAW applications you throw at it. I've never had to freeze tracks yet since my computer can handle it fine, but that could easily change as I add more and more vst plugins.

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So I would say your problem would have something to do with a glitchy VST module.

*maybe* but this is actually a vocal track, not a synth. Although, yeah I guess some of the FX or automation could be throwing it off.

With a high-end computer, there's no need to freeze tracks imo. A large amount of RAM and an Intel i7 processor (extreme edition and overclocked for purists) would be able to handle any DAW applications you throw at it.
You can't generalize like that. As you said, it simply depends on the number of VSTs you have loaded. I seriously doubt that ANY modern computer could compete with my reckless use of FX plugins. I have a "singer-songwriter" template that loads up 21 plugins for a single guitar and a single vocal track.

Don't judge me.

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I would think that the most practical thing to do would be to bounce when the machine is having problems , but then do final renders with all freezes off. I may be wrong , but if you're rendering from freezes , you're rendering audio tracks down to audio tracks , and depending on the bit depth and sample rate of your bounces , you may end up with a slightly lossy render.

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I may be wrong

And you are. It only makes sense that Sonar would freeze to the session format. And the track is frozen before the mixing algorithm, so there's really no possibility for loss. Also, Harmony observed the issue as a panning inconsistency; bit depth and/or sample rate reduction wouldn't account for that.

Frozen tracks should be imperceptible from unfrozen tracks. There is something buggy going on.

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