Freezing and Gluing - A cautionary tale

[uab9253]

I don't know if this has been coverered yet, but in my quest to reduce CPU load while recording, others here turned me on to the magic of using the freeze function to save processing overhead. Basically you engage the freeze button in the inspector window on the track and it renders down the processed signal to plain old audio. This is essentially what happens at mixdown, but in this case you are only doing it to one track. The real beauty is that you can always un-freeze later if you want to tweak something.

One possible pitfall I have discovered is that if you have a track where 2/3 of say the bass part, was one take and then the last third was a second take you can see a line between those 2 parts on the track. I have learned that you want to engage the glue tool and click that line with it and glue the 2 parts together before a freeze or the second part will either have no effects or not be there at all. Even a track that you record a part at the beginning, then stop, then go to the end to hit record again. Those are 2 separate audio events and you can see the space between them in the track window. Even if you control click and select both chunks and freeze it does the same thing. You have to glue them, which will make it look continuous but with a flat line of silence between the waveforms of the 2 audio parts.

So glue before you freeze.

I had another one today where I glued 2 takes of a bass part and froze and the whole thing just went away. There was a flat line in the track window. I had already tracked some vocals against a soloed gtr part b4 I noticed, so even with Undo History, I had to undo all my subsequent tracking to get back to where I killed the bass.

So this whole freeze thing is something that I am finding does not always do what I expect it to, but when it does, it frees up CPU headroom so I can keep working. Share your freeze stories here if you'd like.

[brandondrury]

Interesting. I never noticed this before. Thanks for the tip.

Brandon

[uab9253]

I am finding that this is not always true, but I am now just doing it anyway, just in case. I am also finding that when I use the Line 6 gearbox on my guitar tracks, that by about 6 instances of it as an insert, I am pushing my CPU, so I am turning into Mr. Freeze. I am loving the Line 6 and using it exclusively for electric now. I will post some stuff soon.