Wish we could manipulate frozen tracks.

ie. I wish I could freeze a VST and then still be able to move it around in a project.


Shouldn’t really be an issue - It’d be just like moving around a piece of recorded audio.


Mike

It would be very nice when I need to re-arrange my tracks. Maybe I want to add an extra bar of something, then I need to un-freeze lots of tracks one by one, move them, and freeze again.

It would be a great time saver.

I think that this is paradox because MIDI is not audio. What you want is to treat MIDI like audio. A freeze is a audio bounce in the background. You then want to manipulate this audio. But you can already do that. You can just make a mixdown and then manipulate the audio.

Why is it not sufficient for you to make an audio mixdown and then to manipulate the audio?
Why exactly do you want to have this feature? What is the problem that you face?

Let me outline what I think is paradox about manipulating frozen tracks. Reproduce this in your imagination.
:arrow_right:
Lets say you have a short 1/16 C1 note of MIDI at the beginning of measure 1. This MIDI Data triggers a long sample, lets say a long two bars GrooveAgentOne “splash” sample.

Now we freeze this MIDI track with let’s say a 8 seconds tail.

So now we can cut between the first and the second bar our frozen midi. We drag the second bar of the splash to lets say bar 8.

Now we have the beginning of the splash from bar 1 to 2 and the other half ending at bar 8 to 9.

Ok, now unfreeze the track…


How do the acoustical events , the split splash, translate back to MIDI in conjunction with our drum sampler?

Maybe it would make sense to outline your usecase and workflow so this community can come up with a solution or think of a possible feature that could assist you in such a situation. :slight_smile:

Cubase Rocks!
Gr,
JHP

The point is to make it easy and quick. It’s just about moving a recorded part, that’s it.

If I unfreeze everything I have in a project, it overloads the CPU beyond belief, so I have to unfreeze one thing at a time, move it, and then freeze again. All that just to move my project a little to the left.

What you can’t do with bounced audio is to unfreeze it, so if I bounce tracks, I have to make multiple sessions for every project, just to be able to go back and change things. Maybe that’s more due to my insane way of working with massive fx chains and automation, but anyway. :mrgreen:

yup, it’s also about creativity and experimentation. This has been requested for a long time and there were so many threads and debates about it on the old forum. Meanwhile programs like Sonar have had it for years already. Maybe steiney could ask them how they managed to do it so well.

I’m still looking for a reason to upgrade to 6 but I still haven’t found one yet, the things I want don’t seem to be coming to cubase. My needs have changed now that I’ve built up my 3rd party plugs but I hope steiney eventually start to listen someday, soon.

I would like to have the ability to move frozen tracks too. But I’m willing to accept some limitations.

For example, it could ‘revert’ to the original midi with a warning dialogue when I unfreeze.

Or, it could ‘revert’ only if I do certain operations like splitting the audio up - i.e. if I just drag the whole track in one chunk then I think it should intelligently undertand that that’s a simple move of the midi data.

Another thing that is clouding this issue is that rendering a VSTi or an audio channel is still tricky because there’s no ‘presets’ in the export dialog window. I.e. There’s so many things to check in this window that I may easily not notice I’m exporting at the wrong sample rate for example (because say I’m working at 44.1 but exporting mixes at 48k). Well, I find rendering is painful when it could easily be a one-click function.

So, consider that if rendering was a lot easier then the need for using Freeze to render wouldn’t come up quite as much.

Come at it the other direction perhaps - I can’t see why there couldn’t be a popup box for freeze which asks if we’d like to import the freeze file as a new audio track. That’d be job done then.

Mike.

Great example of what won’t work with movable frozen tracks but I think you’ve moved beyond what was actually asked for. Cutting up and editing the segment is not the same as simply moving it. In most instances, for me, moving it is all I want to do. The aim being to unfreeze as little as possible…please! :slight_smile:

It’s mind boggling why we still can’t do this.

Either that, or just let us easily apply fx to audio without the hassle of exporting and reimporting to another track. It’s been said a million times before, but Steinberg don’t seem to get how important this is to so many of us.

It’s mainly for the CPU saving. If I use the freeze feature It automatically unloads the samples if I’m using something like PLAY or Kontakt.

It’s a real pain when you have to start unfreezing stuff just so you can add in a bar. I do a lot of production music where you have to write music to exactly the 30 secs - 60secs - 3mins etc… Adding in bars becomes necessary.

Just upgraded to Cubase6 from Cubase4 however and in general im finding it miles better.

Mike

This. Four years later and here we are… For everyone wondering how this would be possible or how it would be helpful- just use Ableton for one project. I think all cubase users (and developers) should be required to learn Ableton and all of its features to get an idea of what they are missing.

I’m composing a 75+ piece orchestral piece in my newly purchased copy of Cubase 8 and 30+ of the Kontakts are frozen for CPU conservation purposes. I just decided that I want to double the length a specific section of the song.

In Ableton, I could simply highlight the section and press (Shift + Command + D). Done. Even if some of the tracks in the section are frozen.

In cubase, I cannot do this. Even the “Paste Time” function is unusable here because it doesn’t adjust all of the events for every track- only the selected track.

Ok… I can overlook this huge missing functionality. I’ll just highlight all of the events after the section I wish to lengthen, and move it all over a few bars.

WRONG. If I do this, all of the frozen tracks remain stuck in place. This then forces me to unfreeze every track ONE AT A TIME, move it all over, then re-freeze every track ONE AT A TIME. This is absurd. (In ableton, you can highlight as many tracks as you want, and freeze them. No excuse for this.)

This turns what should be (and is in Ableton) a single key command into an enormously over-complicated, time consuming process.

I’ve been loving a lottt of things about Cubase since getting into it for composing. I must say, however, that althought SB likes to brags about its workflow, as a long time Reason/Logic/Ableton user I can tell you that since moving to cubase, my workflow as been taking a huge beating. At least twice a day I find myself stuck, googling ways to enable a feature just to find out that it doesn’t exist.

Theres no reason why I shouldn’t be able to - move events on frozen tracks, freeze/unfreeze multiple tracks at a time, and duplicate a section with its time included, moving everything else over the length of the section. The lack of these features collectively adds HOURS of unnecessary time wasting tasks to every large project I attempt.

If I am missing something and just wasting my time by overlooking hidden features, please let me know.

Is there a way to duplicate a frozen VSTi part? This must be incredibly common requirement after a VSTi freeze.

  1. Your CPU is being gobbled up.
  2. You have not yet finished an arrangement of a song.
  3. You freeze and then cannot duplicate or move a frozen part.
  4. You export instead and go through the file menu etc.

Until I can duplicate or move a frozen part Freeze is incomplete as a useful function and will remain unused.
I hope someone can come along and tell me in 8.x it is possible.

EDITED: it seems you can using the following method:

Render in place “Complete signal path” and add “Tail size” for reverb and delay on sends. Assuming sends is included in “Complete signal path”.

Good stuff.

Being a newer user of Cubase I am just running into the issue of not being able to do minimal manipulation of frozen tracks. I’m surprised that this issue which appears to be from at least 2011 has not been addressed at all. All I would like to do is insert four bars of silence at a certain point in my project. I have many tracks frozen to save on CPU usage and I need to manually unfreeze every track, do the insert and then manually freeze all of the tracks again. Even having an “Unfreeze all” option, or being able to save a snapshot of your frozen track configuration that can be recalled would be very helpful.