Is there some sort of Freeze / Render in place for Reference Tracks in montage?

Hi. New to Wavelab here.
I’m mastering a track in montage that needs a lot of plugins for restoration, i put the track in a reference track that pitches it to my analog chain, and i’m capturing it with a new track.
The restoration plugins are very heavy and even a few of them will create cpu spikes (i already have the highest buffer).
In PT i used to do this and then freeze the track for the final pitching and capture to guarantee there were no clicks, pops, stops, etc, but it appears there is no way to perform freezes or render in place for the pitching tracks, or am i missing something?
Thanks

No, it looks like you can’t do that.

I’m curious what the “right way” is to do this, but I might consider making a backup of the original, opening that song in the audio editor, and doing the edits destructively as necessary and then just linking the montage to that rendered file.

By principle, a reference track is excluded from any rendering. Hence you should prepare your material on another track or montage, and then move it there.

This is another good case for the option to make a track inactive or offline once it’s no longer needed, but you don’t want to lose any settings in case you need it again.

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Justin, i’ve been learning wavelab from seeing your videos (many thanks for that, they are very useful), but i’m not sure you mean or how to make this in the montage. is there a yt video where you show this?
Thanks

Right, do you know if i can use a regular track to pitch the program material to my analog chain or i can only use a reference track? it appears i can only send it to the DA via a reference track??
Or you mean prepare the audio in a track in the montage, render it and put it in the reference track?
I manage to do that yesterday, but it was incredible unpractical, it required several steps, exports, load the external file, etc. Is there a more streamlined way of doing this that you’re aware?
Thank you

Yes, i’m basically trying to find “the right way” too.
I’ve tried that but i can’t get a long very well with the montage, since it appears there are no plugin chains there other than the master one? or am i missing something again?
All this process looks unnecessarily complicated…

The Audio Montage has Clip Effects, Track Effects, and Montage Output Effects all found in the Inspector.

This all comes before the Master Section which in my opinion is really not needed for any plugin processing if you want to avoid it.

I’m still kind of wondering why you’re doing the restoration with plugins that you need to keep running as opposed to doing it destructively in an editor.

You can still open a chunk of a reference track (via time selection) in an external editor, do what you need to do there, then save it in the editor (but leave it open to use it’s undo history if you need to change things later or go back to it) and then use that as your pitch track.

WL is very good about tiny and inaudible crossfades with this kind of edit. And if you grab a little bit “extra” before and after what you want to edit, it’ll just crossfade between identical audio.

I very much could be missing something about what you’re trying to do. But, any time your computer can’t keep up with the plugins you’re trying to run, the answer is to bounce to audio…it’s just that the reference tracks, specifically, are prevented from doing this because that’s how they’re designed to work.

AFAIK, the way people are using them for pitch tracks was a happy accident rather than what they were actually designed for.

As for the other question about pitching and catching with normal tracks instead of reference tracks…yes, but you won’t be able to see them in the result in same montage.

What you would do is set up the loop for your Analog Chain as an External Effect, put that where it makes sense to you (clip, track, or montage output, probably not master), render through it, and have the setting active to open the resulting audio file in a new montage. Justin’s “Initial Montage Render” preset would basically do this automatically.

I believe that if you put the analog loop as a track effect, the bounce button would then work how you expect (essentially printing clip effects before the loop).

Sorry, i didn’t meant the montage, i meant the audio editor or how it’s called (the destructive on)

Yeah, i changed to wavelab because i wanted to use the clip effects on the audio montage, like Sequoia works, but i’ve tested it and it’s much more heavier using exactly the same plugins on the clip instead of in the montage.
I love the software itself, but still a lot of these processes look clunky and inefficient, i can barely or not at all run my plugins chains from other daws

Anyway, i managed to understand how to do the bounce with the effects from the audio montage, but this is a destructive process, is there a way to freeze this type of bounce or revert it after is done for editing? It works ok, but it would be a nightmare for revisions…

What kind of plugin chains are you trying to run? I master many projects all “in the box” in the Audio Montage with a number of plugins at 96k and don’t have any performance issues. I never use the Audio Editor other than to analyzer incoming or outgoing files…

That being said, I don’t use Acustica plugins and I never run iZotope RX live in a project, but instead prefer to manually make the edits as needed for a more detailed approach, and because RX modules can be very CPU heavy.

What is your playback buffer set to in WaveLab?

Hey Justin, heavy stuff like dynamic processors, multibands, maat eqs, unison, weiss, on hq etc, but the specifics are not very relevant here, i’m just trying to understand if if there’s a way to do this as real time as possible and a working method that would allow me to do revisions easily.
I’m also with a 2048 buffer size and i have an imac with 14 processors, which is not ideal for heavy load on a single track, but i was hopeful the multi-thread would work better.

In PT, for example what i would do is to have one track for pitching and i would make all my correction on this one while pitching it to the analog chain and capturing with another track that would have my post analog plugins, other multibands, digi eq, limiter etc. I could hear everything in realtime and if the processing got to heavy on the pitching side, i would just freeze the track. This way, when i had to do a revision, i could just open the project and unfreeze the pitch if needed.

What i’m seeing with wavelab is that it appears i’m stuck with having to freeze the pitching track or process it separately.
It’s true that most the times i won’t need necessarily to correct the pitching track on a revision, but if the client sends me a revised mix, it would be absolutely necessary because i’ll need to redo all my pre-pitching process on the revised mix. Fairly easy to do in PT, just unfreeze, replace the audio track and freeze again. I’m not seeing an easy way to do this in WL.
Any ideas?
Cheers

+1 - Just circling back to this. I also support this feature for a future version of Wavelab.

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