Dissappointing Freeze

Obineg · Post by **Obineg** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:16 am

"While a track is frozen, you cannot change the details of its clips - but, unique to Live 5, "frozen" clips retain their real-time launch capabilities. This means that you can improvise, perform and sketch out song arrangements even while tracks are frozen. You could transfer a project from your big studio PC to an older PowerBook and keep working - even though the laptop is not powerful enough to handle all the virtual instruments and effects in the project, and even though the project is using plug-ins that are unavailable on the laptop!"

"sketch out song arrangements even while tracks are frozen." From this I gathered I could freeze a track in session view and record into arrangement without unfreezing. Yet, Live 5 won't allow that, as soon as you record your frozen clip into an arrangement it will unfreeze itself. I'd be curious how this works if you don't even have the original plug installed.

Am I missing something or is this a bug ?

I sincerely hope this is not the right behaviour, but if it is it kinda renders the almighty Freeze abit useless for me.

braj · Post by **braj** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:44 am

I don't have the beta, but I think it is that the track is frozen as a group and all the clips in it. You can rearrange these clips (can you do this in Arrange view) and trigger them in real time, but if you try recording in to that track, it will become unfrozen (because it was frozen as a whole unit). Is that how it's behaving?

Obineg · Post by **Obineg** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:56 am

I mean as in recording arrangements, recording clip launches into arrangement view, not recording to a track.

And yes it will freeze the track as a whole, that is all the clips in that track , but won't allow much else than triggering them and adjusting mutes and level of the mixer. Which is still more than most DAW's freeze will allow, but somehow I would have thought you could at least "sketch out arrangements" as they say in their brochure.

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 3:59 am

Obineg brings up a good point.

you cant move around freezed clips, in the arranger or session.

to move it around you must unfreeze.
if you dont have the plugins your friend is using, unfreezing means you wont get those FX back, which means you cant rearrange your friend's stuff.

so i am thinking that they are either referring to "sketching" by means of recording into the arranger. or there is some sort of "deep freeze" function we haven't learned about yet, in other words a function that turns that freezed track into its own 'resampled' .wav or .aif.

abes?

braj · Post by **braj** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:02 am

Can you route the audio from that track to a new track and record it? I know that isn't perfect but it is a workaround. How much degradation to sound quality would take place doind that?

Vercengetorex · Post by **Vercengetorex** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:06 am

braj wrote:Can you route the audio from that track to a new track and record it? I know that isn't perfect but it is a workaround. How much degradation to sound quality would take place doind that?

So little, it is nearly incalculable.
Not really any actually, but I have been watching a lot of Carl Sagan lately and really wanted to say "incalculable".

Remember, this is all digital... re-recording something "inside the box" will not degrade the sound one bit (pun intendedado).

Obineg · Post by **Obineg** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:12 am

actually you can, but that was the poor mans freeze in live 4, ie a workaround to save cpu. Having Freeze and still having to do that somehow takes the fun out of it.

I'd rather have a option like Adam J hinted at, that is, a hardfreeze of sorts that would give proper audio files and either hide or delete the tracks plugs.

Tracktion has that, Freeze and 'convert to audio'

either way , I think I'll survive , but , If Abes move heaven and earth Life would be easier.

raapie · Post by **raapie** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 5:25 am

yes, I didn't understand it either, might be caused by freezing effects as well.

korn666 · Post by **korn666** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 8:38 am

mhnn is it not possible to freeze a 4 bar loop in arrange view and copy or move it around ???

I thought this was possible with live 5...

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 10:39 am

I'm liking the deep freeze idea Adam, it'd be really handy to be able to convert the frozen clip to a real audio one, maybe by simply dragging it to an audio track (if it was a midi track).

DJRetard · Post by **DJRetard** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 10:54 am

Freeze in ver five is limited and recording via resampling is what most were doing in ver four. I thought we were going to be able to at least drag a clip to another slot

Robert Henke · Post by **Robert Henke** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 11:26 am

... we plan to add a comand which will make a real audio clip out of the frozen track. However this would also mean we need to program something which can turn a MIDI track into an audio track. Well, we work on it.

Robert Henke / Ableton

Martyn · Post by **Martyn** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 11:29 am

Robert Henke wrote:... we plan to add a comand which will make a real audio clip out of the frozen track. However this would also mean we need to program something which can turn a MIDI track into an audio track. Well, we work on it.

Robert Henke / Ableton

What about simply dragging the frozen clip to a spare audio track? Just a thought.

ilia · Post by **ilia** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 11:50 am

Robert Henke wrote:... we plan to add a comand which will make a real audio clip out of the frozen track. However this would also mean we need to program something which can turn a MIDI track into an audio track. Well, we work on it.

Robert Henke / Ableton

A typical "freeze" operation that I had to do in Live4 was: create an audio track next to a midi track, route the midi track to the audio track, resample, copy all mixer automation/sends/volume/pan from midi to audio track, turn off the instruments/plugins in the midi track. Just having a shortcut for that would be more useful than the current freeze imo.

headquest · Post by **headquest** » Sun Jun 19, 2005 1:35 pm

Yes, now that I've spent more time with Live 5's freeze, I don't think it does what the publicity claimed it would do

I had thought that the clips within the track would be frozen (i,e. rendered in the background in a temp file) and you could launch them still in real time. That seems not to be the case which is disappointing.

However, you can of course freeze a completed track in the arrangement view to save on CPU (as in Tracktion, Sonar, etc) and that is certainly still useful. And UNLIKE Tracktion, you can still adjust the volume level and pan settings,... the inability to do this in Tracktion was one of the many things that led to me semi-abandoning it. Deeply annoying!

So the freeze in Live 5 is a good start, but apparently not exactly what I was hoping for...

...but in other good news, Live 5 seems (as of this beta version) to be far more CPU efficient than Live 4. That is really good news