Render in Place - for hungry plugins to save cpu power

[stefan-franz]

Hallo,
let me suggest a feature its called in other DAWs “Render in Place”.
With this function a track (e.g midi instruments with plugins …) is rendert as a Wav directly in the project. And after that, when a play the project, the DAW plays only the wave and not the hungry plugins.

Of course with the option, to come back to “normal” modus. So if the producer mean, that the track has to be modified, then come back in the normal modus, the wav can be deleted…and after editing the track, render in place again…

With this function a DAW is able to play huge projects with a lot of hungry plugins.

[paul (Paul Davis)]

Ardour already has this feature, which called “Freeze” in Ardour and several other DAWs. You can access it by right clicking on the track you want to freeze. It will render the audio to a new file, replace the track contents with that new file, and disable all plugins in the track.

[stefan-franz]

Oh…yes i see it for audio its called freeze

And for midi Instruments it’s called bounce. After bounce, i have to create a new Audio track and pull the bounced track (from the sidebar sources) in that track - right? Automatical a new Audio in the project is not creating?

BTW: Bounce without a signal processing makes only a new midi file - not wave. I thoucht the difference would be e.g. with effects like eqalizer or inserts in the Midi instruments track - or not.

[paul (Paul Davis)]

Converting a MIDI track to an audio track is substantially more complex, and involves all sorts of tradeoff for the user.

[stefan-franz]

The idea would be:

To “freeze” a midi track would:

1. Create an Audio track from a midi instrument
2. Mute the Midi-Track

To defrost: Unmute the midi track - delete the audio track of last freezing.

So it could save resources and if needed, the midi track can be adjust.

[x42 (Robin Gareus)]

Simply muting won’t reduce DSP load. Mute is automatable (you can unmute any time), and muted tracks still process the signal. In Ardour you can deactivate tracks or busses to save CPU power (right-click on the track-header in the editor or mixer).

Furthermore you should be able to move the produced audio region, (eg. shift the whole region in time, insert time) and the original MIDI should follow.

Ideally one could also detach the bounced audio and edit it (split, trim,…). However those edits will then not propagate back to the original MIDI.

These days with fast multicore CPUs, saving resources is less of an issue. The main benefit of freezing is to be able to retain a given sound for the future; in case the synth changes, or a plugin becomes unmaintained, or is not available on a different system.

[stefan-franz]

Good hint for deactivate a track. Thanks.

And freeze of a midi track in Cubase is freeze (as i remember) - if i want to edit something, i make a defrost, edit, and freeze agin. As mentioned a way for huge systems and hugry plugins to export directly a track into a wav.

There are some plugins on the market, e.g. orchestral instruments, who are very cpu hungry and for that it’s useful.

But with bounce, it can done manually.

[Largos]

As said, bounce with processing already makes an audio file from the midi which is put in the sources section but it’s a bit inconvenient and unintuitive.The bounced item just “disappears” (there is no obvious feedback from the action) and you need to go searching for it and drag the item from the side menu. Would it be possible when bouncing items to have an option to put the item into a new track (like there is when exporting audio)

Something like this…