Is there a way to prevent MIDI loading when opening a project after mixdown to shorten load times? Muting the MIDI tracks does not do it. All info appreciated.
Try Disabling or Freezing them.
Hi raino - thanks for the fast reply! That works to remove the MIDI but, well, on further examination I actually need to prevent the VST libraries from loading - that’s what’s taking so long to load. I am thinking of just doing a Save As and removing the VST libraries and MIDI altogether. I was hoping there was another way. Apologies for the confusion.
Freezing should do what you want, have you tried it? It renders the Track to Audio & uses that & not the VSTi for playback.
The title of the thread is a little misleading.
Are you using Instrument Tracks or Rack Instruments?
Sorry @mlib, I am using a mixture of Instrument Tracks (Kontakt) and rack Instruments (EW Opus).
@raino I’ve already rendered the tracks to audio. I suppose I’m going to have to remove the VST instruments and Save As another file.
That doesn’t matter either way. If you Freeze an Instrument Track it will not load its VSTi while Frozen. This is entirely independent of any Rendering you may have done.
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Thanks @raino . I’ll give it a shot.
That’s exactly what I do here. My projects all start out a mix of hardware MIDI and software instruments. As the project moves on, some of those software instruments move from Halion into my actual samplers (sorry Halion, you can’t beat an 808 coming out of my EMU). Once the hardware MIDI tracks are recorded in, I render all the VSTi’s from bar 1 to the end (since rendering can grab them pre inserts and just duplicates the whole thing in audio for you). Now that everything is audio, save it as ‘Project Name (Mixdown)’ and I delete all the MIDI/VSTi stuff so I can just focus on the actual mix down. I hate having to move tracks around or hide things, and I like my whole arrangement to fit on one display if possible (most of my projects are around 24-30 tracks) so I can see it ALL., and this wraps it up for me…
Now you’ve got your mix down file with the ‘released’ version you can archive, and along with that, you’ve still got the original MIDI/VST arrangement you can go back to when its time for remixing or fixing something… I learned a long time ago not to count on projects saved with MIDI and VSTi tracks to work properly in the future (you should see my VST32 folder leftover from 20 years ago), so at the very least everything gets ‘archived’ to individual audio tracks…
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Can’t seem to freeze racked tracks (the majority) just instrument tracks. So I’m going with @Monotremata 's solution. Thanks!
LOL a quick tip… For those VSTi tracks that don’t start at bar 1, make sure you insert an empty MIDI region there before you render.
Say the first part starts at bar 17, then you’ve got some other MIDI parts further down the track… Rendering it as ‘one event’ will start the wav file at the first part, bar 17. This used to irk me until I realized I could just put an empty MIDI region at bar 1. Then when you render the tracks, everything lines up, so even if you need to take it to another DAW, its easy as hell to pick up and start working…
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