Freeze all selected tracks?

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

They already have implemented some things from Studio One like the automation transformer (shaper?) and some other things. Everybody copies everybody. Par for the course.

On topic,

Cubase having an editable freeze would not be like S1’s because the architectures are different. Cubase uses a “virtual” kind of system for freeze, a system that ties into it playing audio files in the background. S1’s Transform is technically just bouncing the instrument to an audio file on the timeline, removing the instrument track, and replacing it with an audio track containing a combo clip that carries both midi and audio. It’s a completely different approach. That’s why it’s called “Transform” and not “Freeze” because it literally “transforms” the track class… with instrument tracks anyway.

So Cubase doing editable freeze would have to work within it’s current freeze architecture, not do what S1 does, unless they just plan to just abandon that freeze architecture, which i doubt. They’d kinda have to do it the Cubase way, not the S1 way.

Yeah, it’s a beast of a feature. Studio One’s attempt, wonderfully ambitious as it is, ended up making it useless for me (unfreeze crashes and the negation of “shared copies”). Which is why I’m back to Cubase.

I think it’s not so much Steinberg has tried and failed, as they have too many other, structural, features related to Tracks that needed to be sussed out. I.e., the new multi-outs in 7.5 (a very welcome feature).

They’re getting there. I’m not a betting man, but here’s my wild guess at a roadmap:

v8.0: Bounce-in-place arrives. It probably doesn’t handle tracks with multi-outs, at this point.

v8.x (Pre 8.5): Bounce-in-place supports multi-outs.

v8.5: More “Print from bus” workflows appear. 8 insert limit finally removed. :laughing: (hey, this is my fantasy roadmap, I can put in it what I choose.)

v9.0: We might see multi-select freeze / unfreeze (a.k.a. “batch” freeze) finally at this point. It would probably work with multi-out, too, since that code would have been nicely refactored from bounce-in-place.

v9.5: The rearrangement of frozen tracks, but it’s not reversible. Basically, a multi-select bounce-in-place. Everyone rejoices, those who don’t care about reversing back to MIDI, claim victory. Steinberg takes a small rest…

v10: Tons of other features not related to frozen tracks. All the stuff the marketing dept. wanted that was put on hold. :laughing: (full multi-touch and high-density display features added at this point. :smiley: )

v10.5: Steinberg doubles-down on other marketing-y features, goes after FL Studio and Ableton. Those wanting full frozen track reversibility are getting more vocal in the forums. :smiley:

v11: Massive launch with full rearrangement of frozen tracks, full reversibility of frozen tracks with no loss of fidelity (i.e., aliased/shared midi regions, or multi-out assignments, insert settings, etc.)

At this point all other users on other DAWs switch to Cubase. Steinberg re-hires the Studio One team and announces plans for “Cubase One,” a new initiative aimed at touch-platforms and integrating Studio One’s MIDI controller assignment workflow.

wakes up from dream – gets back to making actual music with already amazing tools

:laughing: ^^^ Brilliant! ^^^ :laughing:

Yeah, the new additions esp. track versions are awesome!

I just wish we could get this solved. I’m currently doing a TV show that has around 35 separate cues per episode. At sometimes 15-20 VSTi’s per session, that ends up being a couple hours of just freezing tracks to take to the session.

I confirm the “shared copies” issue but I definitely do NOT confirm the crashes. Never had a single crash (not a single one…) with S1 in many months, using the same 3rd party stuff which makes my C7.0.6 crash quite often.

Anyway I really don’t understand why SB is still delaying the introduction one of most wanted feature ever. Do they listen to us?

S1 was 100% crash-free until I hit a certain memory threshold. It was quite a large project that unfortunatly was kinda my “template,” so I didn’t want to trim it down.

I suspect that unless you have a massive amount of plugins loaded, you’ll not run into the issue. In all other respects, Studio One was very stable.

I’ve got an ongoing dialog with Presonus on it and I actually owe them feedback regarding the latest version, which I have not had time to test yet. It may have been fixed.

Likewise for me, Cubase used to crash like crazy back with 6.5, which is why I switched to S1 back then. But now, since 7.04+, Cubase has been rock solid for me.

Yeah, the freezing thing really affects me, too. I push the machine to the limit with bus effects and it forces me to freeze all but a couple tracks. So, I’m constantly freezing and unfreezing.

This is the kind of task computers are supposed to automate. :slight_smile:

Big problem for me w/ freezing:
My UAD plugins look active when unfreezed, but they are in fact, NOT.
…they only look like they are activated again!
Be aware!
…don’t unfreeze your tracks w/ UADs.

Some kind of automatic freezing would be nice, running in background at low resources. It would make sense to make files out of most realtime processing automatically. This would help with mixdown too, both in speed and reliability. Instead of “freeze” button, we could have “realtime” button then, which we would enable only for those tracks thet need realtime processing.

Yeah, something along these lines would be great. Imagine if it were scalable like Cinema 4d where a render farm could be built out of spare PCs. The would solve the current problem of having networked computers needing full copies and licenses of all the plugins and all the fussy connectivity issues and “patchbay” plugins. It would just be farming raw CPU cycles.

Think of a modest rack of computers offloading dozens of tracks faster than real-time. :astonished:

Video and 3d get this kind of first-class citizenship, it’s time audio did, too.

I have nothing against Studio One, but their marketing department needs to be fired… Studio One | PreSonus

Who makes music while standing/sitting like that!?!