I miss this simple option from Ableton Live. When you have a frozen track, you can simply choose to flatten it to audio in one quick stroke. Right click file/Flatten/Done. Which serves the same purpose as rendering to audio in Cubase. It also happens pretty much instantly - no waiting for offline rendering.
Unless I’m mistaken, in Cubase we need to unfreeze the track first, then choose render to audio, and wait. Just seems a bit like an unnecessary redundancy? I’m all for little time savers.
In Cubase, a frozen track is audio, albeit not able to be directly manipulated in the same way an audio track would be in terms of editing and such. And, depending on the options you choose when freezing, inserts may already be frozen into the audio (or not).
It is definitely true that, if you want to render a track to audio (literally, in terms of the “render in place” function), you have to unfreeze the track first, then do the render. However, another option would be to render the track to audio in the first place – i.e. instead of freezing it – and set the options so that it disables the original track that you are rendering, if that’s what you are ultimately intending.
Being that all my instrument tracks are MIDI, and my computer isn’t exactly state of the art, I tend to freeze early, and I do find it less than optimal that certain manipulations require unfreezing the track first. For example, a common one would be where I’ve included the inserts in the freeze (e.g. if doing a virtual guitar plus guitar amp simulator as an insert), where I want to change something in the inserts chain, or if I want to render a submix that includes a frozen track to a combined audio file. But that may be partly because I’ve been in the habit of freezing instrument tracks from prior to switching to Cubase (from SONAR). Perhaps, if I’d been using Cubase longer, I might be more inclined to use the render functions instead of freezing?
In any case, I would tend to agree that it would be nice to be able to “render in place” without having to unfreeze frozen tracks. That might not be ideal in all instances, but, for most of the cases where I am wanting to do it, it would be helpful as I’m usually not wanting to change anything in the frozen track when trying to render multiple tracks into a submix (my most common case for rendering in place at the moment, often only for temporary performance savers, for example to have a single stereo track to track vocals against – I tend to work around that by rendering a submix and having that go to a new track, after which I disable the tracks that were combined to do the render; this doesn’t require unfreezing tracks).
Yeah I mean the main advantage of freezing is freeing resources but of course also making it very simple to go back to MIDI to make changes, when you know you’re not entirely done with a track. You can do this of course as rendering but workflow wise, it’s more cumbersome. I use RTA a lot but there’s definite situations where freeze much more useful more useful. I tend to use RTA in situations where I might’ve otherwise used offline processing.
A one click solution to convert to audio would be handy. I didn’t realise how useful it was until I moved away from Ableton. The advantage there to is no more waiting for re-rendering. Converting from frozen to flatten happens instantaneously.
One thing you can do with the freeze files – it’s not exactly “one click” – is drag them from File Explorer (on Windows, probably from Finder on Mac) – into the project. I think it will prompt for bit-depth conversions (e.g. the frozen audio will likely be 32-bit or 64-bit float, depending on your audio engine setting), which you can do or not, and also whether to add it to the Pool (which you’ll want to do in case of unfreezing later). But that only works for the one track at a time case, not for combining multiple frozen tracks into a single audio track.
That’s not as convenient as what you’re talking about, with the copying and such happening behind the scenes, but it can potentially save time over unfreezing, rendering, then freezing again.
Of course, it will have any inserts frozen with the track included in the audio, but any “instant”/one-click solution to render frozen tracks to audio would inherently have to do that to avoid unfreezing first.
Also, another way I deal with this sometimes when I think I’m still going to want to tweak MIDI later is render to audio, then just disable the instrument track(s), which has the same CPU-saving potential as freezing but does make the separate audio track, giving the usual options you get with rendering in place if you want to specify what is included.