freeze tracks

[polyidus]

Could you make it so that you can freeze a track even when it has a sidechain on it ? Would this be something you could write into the program ?

[ollyb303]

I don't see how it would work. Just record it to a new track.

[polyidus]

it would be a lot quicker to be able to freeze it with the sidechain effecting and it would have the same effect as recording it .

[ollyb303]

Yes, but the track with the sidechained compressor on it doesn't know what audio input the sidechain will receive, so it can't know when it should compress. Imagine the compressor is sidechained to an audio track which is getting it's audio from an external input, e.g. a live drummer... How can Live know at the point of freezing what the drummer would be playing during the frozen time period? It can't - that's why you can't do it.

[polyidus]

If the sidechain signal is coming say from a ghost kick from impusle into an operator bassline in must know then . it manages it when you do a mix down of a whole track so why not on a freeze and flatten ? if the signal was from a live drummer then yes you would have to record it but when its all internal i dont see why it would be a problem.

[ollyb303]

Depends really... If you're working in session view and you have a 16 bar bass clip in your track with the compressor on, sidechained to your impulse track which, in theory you could have 4 4 bar midi clips with variations of your kickdrum on. Live doesn't know which of these clips you would fire off during the 16 bars. In arrangement, you could argue that it's fixed, but you could also override the impulse arrangement with session clips. In fact there are many scenarios where it wouldn't work and only one where it would be technically possible, but that would be asking a piece of software to make an assumption, which is fraught with danger!

[ollyb303]

Another alternative is to create an audio track, copy your compressor onto it, then disable/remove the compressor from your bass track, freeze and drag the frozen audio clip to your new track.

[RumbleMonk]

I must be missing something here... If you can record to a new track then Live should be able to do this internally/'behind the scenes' automatically and therefore be able to freeze it. Imho Live just doesn't look very far on track dependencies.

Other DAWs can do it.

I find this process in general very frustrating. I work with other people often and use VSTi's that those don't have, so I need to bounce those down to wave. However, I want to keep any Live processing 'live' so I only bounce the VSTi only, not the fx. So my process is:

Switch off all Live fx
freeze track
create audio track
select frozen clip section
copy to audio track
switch on all fx
select all fx
copy those to the audio track
make sure all track levels and sends etc are copied over.

If Live could do a 'freeze instrument only' option this would be less of a hassle, or even convert a midi track to an audio track (most of the time useless, I know) so that I could just duplicate the midi track and convert to audio so that at least I don't have to copy all fx and fix sends etc.

I'm not sure really, just throwing out things right from my head so I might think of a better solution right the second I leave my computer..

It's a hassle anyway, would love to see something done here.

[edit]
For sidechaining I'd recommend checking out LFOtool anyway, it works really well for simple beats and since it doesn't depend on anything it'll freeze just fine.

[ollyb303]

Other DAWs can do it.

Other DAWs don't have Session View - the arrangement is fixed - this is key here.

[RumbleMonk]

Other DAWs can do it.

Other DAWs don't have Session View - the arrangement is fixed - this is key here.

Oh I see what you mean now..

This is a restriction of course, but all Live would have to do is to ask 'track has device dependencies - do you want those disabled during freeze?'. Then once frozen the device in question will be live while the rest won't, in this case the compressor. In session view Live would probably have to state the fact those devices will not be frozen, whereas in arrangement view it should ask.

I'm pretty sure we will see a solution at some point soon, it still seems like a simple solution to me. Unless there's something else I'm missing.