I know that it’s currently not possible to duplicate a frozen track, and I would like to post this feature-request to add that functionality to Cubase. Here’s why:
Many of my projects are being sent elsewhere for mixing and mastering. Since these mixing engineers use different DAWs, I will send them both wet and dry WAV stems of each of my tracks in Cubase (they need both, since they will do their own processing on some tracks, and keep the baked-in processing on others).
As I finalize the production stage of these projects and get them ready for mixing, I freeze each track (incl. their inserts) for two reasons:
One, it’s necessary because some of these projects are large and the computer won’t be able to keep up with processing unless I start freezing tracks.
Two, some plug-ins, either by design, or by malfunction, will not reproduce the exact same audio every time you play a track (this is true esp. for effects inserts), so I need to be able to capture a run-through of those tracks and freeze that audio as a WAV file so that it stays constant as a project is being finished.
I can export the wet stems of my projects just fine to get them sent off for mixing (this is fast and easy since inserts/effects will already be rendered into the track audio via the freeze function).
I have a problem making dry stems though because when I unfreeze these tracks so that their dry audio can be exported, I now lost the frozen/rendered authoritative version of the audio, which I can’t recreate by simply re-freezing the tracks (due to some plugins not being able to generate the exact same audio again).
My workaround is to save off a copy of the whole project directory (frozen WAV files and all), then unfreeze the tracks, render my dry stems, then throw that project away and copy the saved-off copy with the frozen tracks back into my working folder.
Not the end of the world, but annoying.
So, if I could simply duplicate the frozen tracks, I could do that, then unfreeze those duplicates, render my dry stems from those unfrozen tracks, and then delete those duplicated tracks without having to resort to file copying gymnastics.
Besides from this somewhat specialized use case, there are plenty of other times when I wish I could duplicate a frozen track, for example, when wanting to experiment with insert effects settings after unfreezing while still keeping the original frozen track around for the reasons I mentioned earlier (in case those experiments don’t work out and I need to go back to the exact same frozen audio).
I hope I’ve made a convincing case for the need for this. But maybe I’m overlooking some other way to achieve my desired outcomes, in which case I’m all ears!
