FEATURE REQUEST: FREEZE IMPROVEMENTS

Steinberg Lounge
#1

Anyone wish the freeze function could be worked on?

I’d love to see some things like:

  1. Background rendering of MIDI/VSTi tracks, so stuff is being seemlessly converted into audio without you knowing, and seemlessly being turned back into MIDI/VSTi when you’re editing. Imagine the massive saving of resources possible!

  2. Allow editing of frozen tracks. Not the individual notes, but I mean, like when you want to duplicate or cut bars. At the moment you can’t do large scale edits to projects unless you unfreeze all the tracks first, one by one.

  3. Batch freezing and unfreezing. The main annoyance for me is having to select and wait for one track at a time. What a bore. If selected tracks could be frozen or unfrozen in batches, at the same speed as the current multiple track export function, it would save a lot of frustration, and free up time to make a quick cup of tea while you wait.

Anyone agree? Any other freeze improvements you’d like to see?

Or is Steinberg’s game plan to wait until the pace of computer technology improvements FINALLY overtakes the ever growing resource requirements of plugins? Then you’ll never need to freeze. But to be honest, that will never happen. New technology will breed new ideas for using the extra resources. Better to fix the freeze.

Fix the freeze!

Fix the freeze!

All together now!

#2

The batch freeze seems like a nice feature. Select multiple tracks and it freezes them sequentially. There are complications though. You would need to set the same options (i.e. tail size, channel or instrument, etc.)

I don’t think the other two are good ideas though. Here is why…
Having Cubase constantly trying to re-render audio files while you make changes seems like a recipe for disaster. It would probably bring most computers to a halt. I would rather decide when I want the audio to be rendered myself.

Even to be able to cut bars out while still frozen won’t yeild the results you want due to tail times of notes played and effects. You would still need to unfreeze and re-freeze for the audio to sound natural in most cases.

Sincerely,
J.L.

#3

Background rendering could be an option rather than a default. I think there’s some other host that does this - is it Logic?

I would be happy to get a few cut-off notes and effect trails on frozen tracks, just while editing, knowing I can unfreeze and refreeze later to fix it. There could even be a ‘flatten edits’ option just for this, available after any changes have been made.

You mentioned the batch freeze being sequential. It doesn’t need to be. Multi track batch export doesn’t do each track sequentially. It might be faster for the batch process to do them all together, who knows, that’s a programming issue hey.

The important things for me is that I had to spend a lot of money on a fast slave PC with SSDs in order to run everything in real time, all because don’t want to use the current freeze feature. And the reason for that is the tedium of freezing and re-freezing tracks one at a time whenever you wish to make an edit to that track, or to the global structure. If you’re working on very big hybrid projects full of orchestral libraries, loads of plugins and audio, you just don’t feel like you have time to go through everything manually like that.

If the improvements I mention were implemented, I think I could pretty much go from a fast iMac + fast PC slave to doing all my projects in a laptop. It could be a dramatic saving of resources and money for me and anyone else.

#4

To my knowledge, only Digital Performer currently supports Background Rendering. Apparently it’s very impressive!

#5

Editing frozen tracks is fine and dandy until the moment you need to unfreeze them. At that point you lose all the time you invested editing those tracks just to have to start all over again. Even if you flatten them, if for whatever reason you need to change a MIDI note or controller data then the flatten version will be obsolete. I really don’t see any use for frozen tracks, unless I’m missing some workflow that will benefit from it.

Freezing multiple tracks at the same time, on the other hand, is something that will benefit a lot of people (including myself). This would be a great feature to have, I agree. Background freezing is another feature that may be cool to have as an option. I don’t think I’d want that to happen all the time, so having it as an option would be the ideal.

Take care!

#6

Group Freeze!

#7

Totally agree on batch freezing, and another thing desperately needed: We need to be able to move frozen events. Just moving them shouldn’t be a problem at all? They won’t be edited at all by that.

#8

The only way that will work is if the MIDI events also move with the frozen ones. Otherwise, when you unfreeze to fix something, the MIDI events will be back to their original location.

#9

Standby. I need to revisit my understanding of the word “freeze.”
J.L.

#10

Sounds practical but I think it might annoy more people than it pleases. If anyone needs (more than simple) freeze these days then generally speaking the software and system is being overdriven somewhere beyond it’s remit for the present hardware generation. Most users will find freeze more than adequate for their needs and until we all find we need it badly and thousands of us lobby for it it is unlikely to happen.
Freeze was really a gift to the owners of old P4 etc systems that used to crack up at the mention of “string quartet” and, my opinion so you can argue the point, was not meant to be a core feature as previous requests for it’s improvement have been roundly ignored.
The questions need asking. Is it just me and a couple of others that need it? Also, why does anyone need it? Is it overambition as to what we think the software is supposed to do?
If it does look viable then it may take some time for posters, as you have already started to, to discuss the ways to implement it and the ramifications of it’s use at least so the programmer has at least a working idea of where it needs to go.

#11

This has been a long-standing request. There is benefit, if you just want to see how it will sound being rearranged or edited a bit. Perhaps you never intend to unfreeze them. Also, Cubase could allow for MIDI to be moved along with audio in the case where clips are cut and pasted from frozen audio. I’d like to see it, but would rather have everything (rewire, 3rd party plugs) 64 bit so I wouldn’t get into situations more likely to require freezing tracks because I have to run 32 bit Cubase.

#12

So what’s the point of lobbying Steinberg to fix other manufacturers shortcomings? They’ve already done you and the tardy VSTi writers a huge favour. I can’t see a major rewrite coming as the Steinberg dev team probably thinks, rightly to my mind, “Why should we program our tripes off if nobody else is moving?”. Or, even the other way why should they work hard on a “solution” that in all probablilty will be obsolete shortly?
They don’t want to put a saddle on a dead horse.

#13

Then why not simply bounce the MIDI to audio if you don’t intend to unfreeze it? Otherwise, it doesn’t differ from Bouncing.

Also, Cubase could allow for MIDI to be moved along with audio in the case where clips are cut and pasted from frozen audio. I’d like to see it, but would rather have everything (rewire, 3rd party plugs) 64 bit so I wouldn’t get into situations more likely to require freezing tracks because I have to run 32 bit Cubase.

I agree with Conman. This is not a Cubase issue but rather one of 3rd party plugin companies. They’re the ones who need to port their plugins to 64 bit.

#14

4 years later and this is still VERY important. Point 2 & 3 are ALREADY featured in Ableton and have been for years!

#15

Perfectly valid request and long overdue.
Ignore conman - he’s a troll :slight_smile: