What exactly gets freed up when I freeze a track?

I’m trying to make a tweak to an old mix. When I created the mix I had 2 UAD-1 cards, I now have 1 UAD-2 card and don’t have sufficient DSP for all of the plug-ins in the mix to load. I decided to freeze some of the tracks (of course, first checking that the plug-ins on those tracks were not the ones that had been disabled by the UAD software) but after freezing 3 tracks then saving and reloading the project I find that I still have the same number of plug-ins disabled.

Now, I appreciate that not all plug-ins use the same amount of DSP. However, one of the tracks that I froze had an instance of UAD Cambridge EQ as an insert and one of the plug-ins that’s disabled on a different track is an instance of the same plug-in so surely there must now be enough spare DSP to enable that instance? Nope.

Does anyone have any ideas? I really don’t want to remix the song from scratch just to do a couple of tweaks.

Secondary question because I’m curious: When I freeze a track, what is actually frozen? I would assume that all insert effects must be (or there would be no point in freezing). But what about send effects? What if those send effects are on effects channels that are used by other tracks too? What about effects on group tracks? If I freeze all of the tracks which output to a particular group track, can I then disable any plug-ins on that group track without affecting the mix or are these not frozen?

I’m going to do more experiments to try to find out the answers to some of these secondary questions myself but if you can help with the primary question - how I can free up some DSP - I’d be really grateful.

Thanks,

Simon.

P.S. Although I mainly use Cubase 5, as this is an old project I’m using Cubase Studio 4 (in case that makes any difference).

Thanks,

Simon.

Freeze does not unload DSP-card FX from the card itself.

Hi thinkingcap,

The manual says:
“After freezing the Inserts for a track, you hear the track play back as before but the insert effects don’t have to be calculated in real time, easing the load on the computer processor”.

As I understand it, Cubase itself doesn’t know that the plug-in runs on a DSP card, not the processor. The DLL handles that interface. To Cubase an effect is just an effect. So, whatever Cubase does to native effects which causes them to release their load on the processor, it also does to UAD effects. If the UAD effect doesn’t then release its load on the DSP card then surely that’s a bug in the UAD software - which also seems unlikely as that’s a pretty basic problem for mature, stable software to exhibit.

Can you explain your answer more fully? Or suggest a work around?

Thanks,

Simon.

It´s the same for Powercore DSP FX. I Don´t know the UAD, but with powercore, disabling a Plugin does not unload it from the DSP - only unloading it from Cubase unloads it from the DSP. Freeze does not unload the FX. I´m sure it´s the same with UAD.

Do you know of any work around?

I realise I could solo the track in question and then export as a mixdown and then import that track back into the project but it’s a lot of work - especially if I need to do that to a few tracks. I also then have to unload the plug-ins from the original tracks which means losing all the settings which makes recreating them later much more difficult if I needed to :frowning:

I guess, that´s why you can save presets…? The other workaround would probably be to get a second UAD card…

Save the song under a modified name so you have an exact copy of the song to edit. Then you can export said tracks back to Cubase using the batch export feature. With the left/right locators in place, solo all the tracks you need to freeze and then export with the batch and it will happen in one fell swoop. Would take seconds.
Then you can delete any effects, tracks or inserts without loss because you’ll have them in your original copy of the song.

Thanks Suprawill1.

It still seems annoying that one needs to go to such lengths but, as you say, it will get the job done!

Thanks again,

Simon.