Like freeze function in Cubase?
Welcome to the forum, Vratislav. No, Dorico does not currently have a āfreezeā function. You can of course export stems of individual instruments etc. if you wish, but that isnāt the same as freezing a track as an audio file for playback within Dorico itself.
love that !
@dspreadbury You know, this would actually be a very welcome feature especially for those of us who scratch out projects on a laptopā¦ Just a freeze for the virtual instrument, so the FX chain remains unaffectedā¦ Perhaps prohibit editing of the staff or midi while a track is frozen, but you can still adjust the reverb, comp, etcā¦ Such a feature would certainly reduce the overhead for larger projects or even smaller projects on lower power machinesā¦ You already have a quality audio engine, so why not utilize it to render a VSTās performance and just play it in the background in place of that particular instruments midi performance when you arenāt editing anything on that instrument to preserve CPU and RAM?
Hi @dspreadbury,
Yeah, definitely the track/staff/instrument freezing would be very welcomed feature in Dorico, especially for those who work on laptop and would like to use high quality libraries on laptops.
Still the Play Mode has room for improvements, so many ideas can be taken from Cubase, including the Freeze function.
Just it has to be very well integrated with Flow conception e.g. options to freeze per Flow and Globally. But somehow the frozen instrument should stay unloaded until the next Flow.
Another useful ability, in order to preserve the editing of the frozen track, will be the replacement with GM library, or Noteperformer. Here after unfreezing, the GM / Noteperformer library should be again replaced by the original one. This is the biggest downside of the Frozen Tracks in Cubase - they canāt be edited if needed. Here another Cubase option that I already asked for, will be very welcomed - Track / Staff Versions (in order to preserve the original staff content). 
Best regards,
Thurisaz
If some of the libraries are hosted in Kontakt, might the āpurgeā function help to free up RAM?
Well if you happen to be using Kontakt that may help abit certainlyā¦
I agree. Itād be nice indeed! Large scores with some libraries can start eating up system resources in ways that can make Dorico get pretty sluggish over time.
If you consider it annoying to mention workarounds or third-party kludges to force features ātodayā, stop reading this post and scroll on down. If you regularly run out of system resources when using Dorico and are interested in some āoptionsā to render and track some things, then read on.
Of course maxing out your RAM can help with some instrument plugins (but not all).
On a less powerful mobile computer I use a couple of workarounds to make it somewhat possible to render and store resource hungry plugins to synced audio files. Itās not an āinstant freezeā. I do need to isolate or solo out track(s) I wish to render and play through the score in real time to get a take, but it does come in handy for large projects with resource hungry sounds on hardware that is less than ideal for running plugins in tandem with the extra overload of processing and displaying a complicated score.
If you also have a tracking DAW capable of MTC sync, there are ways to route Doricoās audio output into the DAW and have it sync with the Dorico transport. If you have a tracking DAW with MTC slave support and that sounds interesting let me know. Iāll go into more detail (or provide links to threads with related discussions). It doesnāt need to be a huge bloated DAW. Something as plain and simple as Cubase Elements can get the job done (perhaps even a free version).
A simpler method I use is through a registered instance of Bidule running as a VST or VSTi plugin (Major MIDI/VST/Audio āSwiss Army Knifeā of an app that can run stand alone, or become a quite powerful āhost within a hostā.
One simpler method is to set up a Bidule instance in a channel effect slot of the Dorico Mixer. I threw together a simple example of a bidule group [Dorico Tracker] where audio files can be started and kept in sync based on a specific ASIO sample count.
Such a bidule group can also be used to play other imported audio tracks in sync with the Dorico transport. Samples or long audio files can be triggered to start on a specific ASIO sample count at any point in the project, and from there it remains in sync with the Dorico transport based on sample count (so yes, you can stop/start Doricoās transport at any point and it all stays together).
Itās possible to record and play back any number of audio files and have them sync to the ASIO Sample count desired, as Dorico is nice about keeping this constant throughout a project (obviously it changes if you swap the system sample rate in Audio options, but tools are provided to monitor the count and set the wave forms in bidule where it needs to be for a near perfect sync).
So, itās possible to do some real-time takes thatāll be in sync with Dorico, then mute and disable the resource hungry instrument plugin(s) in question.
Note that youād obviously need to do retakes if you alter the tempo. Another potential problem with any synced audio might be that Dorico provides options to āhumanizeā playback. Iām not sure if this āhumanizationā remains constant every time a score is played, or if it has random variations with each subsequent play-back, but it seems reasonable that after significant changes to playback or score interpretation characteristics to a project, youād want to do a retake.
Well another added side effect to a virtual instrument freeze function would emerge in the realm of collaborationā¦ The ability to share projects amongst other users without them needing things like the same VSTiās you may be using nor their associated expression maps to emulate the same exact listening experience of that of the original composer would be monumentalā¦ The project you share would essentially be a frozen snapshot of the vision you intended to share with a fellow collaborator without all the unforeseen hiccups that typically occur when sharing projects between dissimilar setupsā¦ Why should a drummer need extensive orchestral libraries on their rig when all theyāre doing is percussion? Sure the person compiling the entire project would have to amass all the various libraries to maintain full editability of the final product, but thereās no reason why the satellite musicians should have to do the sameā¦ Think of it more as a hub and spoke type arrangement, thereās no reason for the hub to be sending out any more data to the spokes than is necessary for them to stay true to the hubā¦ Itās the spokes which need to be sending their contribution and all itās facets (like expression maps and libraries used) back so as for the hub to stay current so itās further transmissions to the spokes all remain up to dateā¦ Just my 2 cents
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