Flatten Arranger Track with Frozen VSTs doesn't work

I use the arranger track on many of my projects to create different arrangements/edits of songs (I simply flatten various arranger chains and then export the stereo out of the flattened project), and I started to freeze my VST tracks to save CPU and be able to work with smaller buffer sizes. Even though I have a high end PC, the latency is unworkable otherwise, for example, when trying to record vocals and monitor through Cubase.

However, when trying to flatten an arranger chain in a project with frozen VST Instruments, I get an error dialog box saying something like (“Can’t flatten arranger chains of a project with frozen tracks”). This is maddening, since this means I can’t use two major features of Cubase together! Am I doing this wrong? If not, are there alternative ways to accomplish the same thing)? Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Hi,

Then everything is working as expected. You get the message, you cannot use it and why you cannot use it.

You can Render In Place instead of freezing.

Yes, Render In Place is one alternative, but it would be nice to be able to use the Freeze capability even when using the Arranger Track. The solution I found was instead of trying to flatten an arrangement, to just activate that particular arranger chain, and then just do an audio export of that arrangement. While that still doesn’t give you a freestanding new Cubase project with the new arrangement, if you’re just trying to do different “cuts” of the same song, that might work for you.

When doing that, I ran into another issue that seems to be a bug, and I’ve tagged it as such in a different post:

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/export-length-issue-with-arranger-track-active/731301

I have 13 frozen tracks and an interesting arranger track and I was just searching for this option and find that it’s not possible. I just wanted to have a good arrangement of the song before I go to defenite audiofiles or maybe mixdown for a mastering in WaveLab. So my idea is to unfreeze all the songs and flatten the chain, but I’m afraid that my CPU will go crazy. Anyway I will try it. What kind of difference does it make to Render in place instead of freezing? Isn’t that almost the same kind of thing, since all the instruments and effects are frozen?

If you unfreeze all tracks and then flatten the chain, you can re-freeze the tracks after the flattening to save CPU.

Render In Place is basically the same as freezing, it just gives you more options (I think).