Freeze all selected tracks?

Is there any way to do this?

I typically have 20 or so VSTi tracks in my projects and have to freeze them all to take them to another studio for recording live overdubs and mixing. It is taking a tremendous amount of time to have to wait for each individual VSTi to freeze before starting the next one.

Is there anyway to set a macro for this? Even if they froze sequentially, I could at least go do something and comeback once it’s done. Sitting for 20min freezing VSTi’s 1 by 1 is getting really tiresome.

Any ideas would be showered with praise and undying affection :smiley:

Hi Pondwalden

Couldn’t you just use “Export” from the file menu, use the “Channel Batch Export” switch and click the tracks you want, you could also export them direct to a flash drive as well.

Best Regards

Dave

Yeah, export them, and select output file type as BWF which also includes their timestamp within the project so you can spot them to their correct positions in the other software…

Interesting though, I thought freeze did something strange to the resulting wav file to remove any silences between the sections and make the file size smaller. Is this not true then?

Mike.

Batch export will do it for you. BUT multitrack freezing, that would be GREAT feature !

T

Thanks for the ideas.

I did try batch export but ran into 2 issues.

  1. I have to reconfigure any sends on the new audio track adding a lot of steps to the process.

  2. I need to have the instrument unloaded and then recallable when I bring it back to my studio after the session. To do that i’d need to go through and save presets for every vsti I was exporting.

Freezing is by far the best way to migrate sessions from place to place keeping all functionality intact. Just wish there was a way not to have to do them one by one.

Management of frozen tracks is one area where Cubase is SERIOUSLY behind any major DAW. In Sonar X2, for example, I can click on a single button and almost instantly turn an instrument track into an audio one. Because a frozen track, unlike with Cubase, is a fully-editable audio track. In Cubase, a frozen track is a dead one, it won’t even stretch. Which means that you can freeze tracks only when you’re completely done with tracking and editing. I.e. useless.

I wish the people at Steinberg took this issue seriously, but from what I’ve seen, it’s been ignored for years, despite many people asking for improvements in this area.

Yeah, multi freeze tracking would be excellent…I vote for it…if we could vote, that is!

Been asking for this one for a LONG time. Every Saturday night I have to freeze 30+ tracks for our church’s music set and it takes forever doing it one by one.

The other important thing that I forgot to mention that is an invaluable bonus to freezing vs batch export is that freezing deactivates the VSTi’s freeing up resources and making load times faster, BUT allows for instant recallability. batch export requires one to make a channel preset, unload the VSTi and reload it with the channel preset to recal and change it.

That not only requires extra steps which amount to a TON of time over the course of 20-30 tracks, but if I did that on every cue I needed the process on, I’d have thousands of track presets with no usefulness gumming up my presets library. (Unless of course you add yet ANOTHER step of deleting them after your done).

C’mon Steiny, lets get a “Freeze all selected tracks” going!!!
Do it for the children :sunglasses:

I put this in the “Feature Request” area. Might help if each of you go put a +1. :slight_smile:

Very true. Shame really, because with its introduction Steinberg were pioneering something. Then it was neglected as numerous other features and gimmicks were brought in over the years.

Off to vote for the feature request!

Yeah, Studio One KILLS at freezing with the Track Transform function. I literally can’t even use another DAW without it at this point.

So true.

Such a killer feature. Once you get a taste of it, it’s hard to go back.

Unfortunately, I had to do just that, as the Studio One implementation (awesome as it is) has one tiny flaw that became a show-stopper for me: any “patterns” (a.k.a., shared copies / aliased copies / ghost copies) get lost in the transformation to audio and back. :confused:

This unfortunate side-effect essentially removes the pattern capabilities of Studio One. Being someone that has used patterns since early drum machine days, losing that, and having to manually update regions across the project, become unacceptable, real quick.

In fact, it essentially made Studio One tantamount to not having even a basic “freeze” function, since there was no way to turn that off – it’s “transform” or nothing.

So, Steinberg, if you’re listening, please don’t impose this same artificial limitation when you add this feature. :wink:

Well, right (of course), but “Bounce to audio” is not a “freeze” function (in terms of workflow).

I mean, there are many ways to simply “get” audio. For example, Studio One has a very nice implementation of recording in real-time (“printing”) from a bus (it’s even nice, visually, to look at).

Another nice thing in Studio One, if one were to Bounce, is that you can quickly power-off all of a given track’s inserts with one button (for that track), rather than each insert, one-by-one (something not possible in Cubase). But, you’d still have to do that manually for every track.

I guess that’s not as important in Cubase since we can only have a total of 8 inserts per track. Ooohhhwww. BOOM. :laughing: (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Anyway, Freeze (or “Transform to Audio” as Studio One likes to call it) is fundamentally broken in Studio One because of this; anytime a feature creates a situation of “data loss” without warning, that’s bad.

It would be like Adobe Illustrator “flattening” a complex vector object into an uneditable bitmap without any warning and with no undo.

Steinberg will NEVER implement those functions. Just because Studio One has them. They will never be second to Studio One, walking in their shadow. Rather they will complicate things in their own way, just to be able to say that they are not copying Studio One. Whatever Studio One has already implemented, Steinberg will surely ignore. Instead they wil try to reinvent the wheel, and we will get tons of some strange and unintuitive functions and toys, just so that the title “update” can be pushed on.
Good thing is that Studio One team is not like that - they seem to have no problem with implementing good features, even if they are already existing in Cubase or other DAWs. It is only a matter of time when Studio One will take over. They are much more open, quick and adapt much better to modern production techniques.
Cubase is a good DAW, but it is not a modern one. It is like an old Mercedes. It is reliable more or less, it drives well, servicing and updating is a bit expensive though… But for all the latest technology one must look somewhere else. Studio One is a really good choice, and it will become even better with time. And it evolves much more quickly than Cubase. Of course, even Studio One will reach its plateau, but then there will again be another fresh DAW, leaving all others in its shadow… Thats just the way it is with things, time leaves things behing.

I think it’s true that they’re not trying to copy any other DAW, Studio One especially (perhaps). However, in the case of Batch Freeze and “arrangablity” of frozen tracks, those two things are such a natural, obvious evolution of the track-oriented workflow, that I suspect we’ll eventually see them implemented in Cubase.

Mainly, because workstation-class computers (including high-end laptops) are starting to flatten in terms of Moore’s Law, and people are purchasing them less as they extend the life of their purchase cycles with lower cost mobile devices; all while the need for more CPU is going up with increasingly affordable, irresistible, CPU-hungry circuit-modeled plugins. Moreover, at least in electronic music production circles, the “lushness” of productions is ever increasing; as is the education of newer engineers into the best-practices of bussing techniques – many of which use stacks of live effects, mastering and so on; essentially, mirroring some of the signal paths and techniques used in professional studios.

In short, more new users are stumbling into more CPU-taxing scenarios than ever before.

What’s the answer to this?

The Freeze function, of course.

Ideally, a freeze function that works transparently and gets out of the way (like Studio One’s) and allows arranging to continue even after being transformed.

There isn’t anyone that wouldn’t welcome this. It’s got to be on Steinberg’s top ten list. I think there’s almost no way they could convolute it – it’s a no-brainer.

The only way I see them taking a different (and more ambitious) path on this, would be an ASIO-Guard on steroids; but I don’t think that’s technically possible. It would have to background-freeze too much, too often.

I’m assuming since I didn’t see a big advertisement about this feature in 7.5 that it is still not available? I didn’t see a comprehensive list of changes/fixes anywhere though so could it be a quiet update?
Here’s hoping

I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I think your assumption is safe (it wouldn’t be a quiet addition). The freezing of tracks is tied to so much, it would be a massive effort / feature / marketing bullet point.

Especially now with the “versioning” feature in 7.5 (which looks AWESOME, btw).

I’m curious to see how this “versioning” of tracks is affected by freeze state. I hope it’s still possible to “switch” to different versions when they’re frozen.

If it is possible, it would make Cubase the ultimate platform for projects where several “remixes” are the norm (and where frozen tracks are the order of the day).

That feature, alone, is worth the price of admission for the update (imho). Huge.

And the “visibility” feature of tracks, with the option to link it to the console and back … !!!

maybe steinberg tried to implement it - but couldnt do it? so they just implement easier stuff thats possible and maybe still try behind closed doors till they can do it and implement it…

programming is not so easy