Freezing multiple audio tracks at once doesn't work

Cubase
,
1
  1. Select multiple audio tracks with any content (no inserts)
  2. Right-click a track and select “Freeze/Unfreeze Selected Tracks…”
  3. Cubase shows a dialog for each track and afterwards the tracks are marked as frozen
  4. No audio plays from the now frozen tracks

Freezing tracks one at a time does work.

I’m on MacOS 26.5.1 and Cubase 15.0.30

2

If you’re freezing an audio track and there are no inserts, is there anything to freeze? I guess maybe if there are “pre” section tweaks (i.e. high-pass, low-pass, gain, polarity)?

FWIW, I have not had any issues freezing multiple tracks in one go as per your instructions (though any tracks I’m freeze would at least be instrument tracks or audio tracks with inserts – there is really no savings to freeze an audio track with no inserts – in fact, it might consume more resource since the audio would be 32-bit or 64-bit instead of 24-bit).

I’d have thought, though, that audio would still play, and there might be some tracks that just didn’t end up frozen, in this scenario.

3

Thanks for the response.

I do have inserts on my tracks, I just didn’t include that here as I was trying to give the minimum instructions to replicating the bug. The issue happens for me regardless of what inserts I have.

4

I suppose there could be something Mac-specific, or specific to your particular version of MacOS (I’m on Windows 11 and decidedly have never seen that issue). However, I expect, if it were a common problem, there would be loads of threads reporting the issue (or at least one with a LOT of people chiming in) as it would seem to be a very common scenario for people to want to do.

The only other thing I can think of at the moment is that, especially if you’re using the 64-bit audio engine, the freezing process may create disk files that use more bandwidth than the original files (probably 24-bit at the same sample rate) did. If there were some issue with the disk on which the freeze files reside, this could potentially create an issue. (For context, when I had a failing hard disk back in my SONAR days, I had an issue very much like that, where things got worse after freezing due to the extra bandwidth needs of the 64-bit audio files.) Odds of that are probably pretty miniscule, though.

Another possibility might be if you’re using the real-time playback option on a freeze and if the system can’t keep up with playing back in parallel with writing the results to the freeze files (probably again most likely in the case of disk issues).

Given that Cubase freezes tracks sequentially, I wouldn’t think there should be any difference in doing multiple tracks in one go or doing a single track.