Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
Siika
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:15 pm

Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Siika » Sat Apr 14, 2018 12:37 am

I often freeze a track to render a single clip to audio. As my set grows larger, there are more and more midi clips on a given track. This prolongs my time to render significantly. So much so that I just create an audio track and resample. This is inconvenient. Please make a feature to render a single midi clip to audio. I think you could simply extend the freeze function to a single clip, apply the same colour scheme to denote that the clip is frozen, and there ya go.

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Sat Apr 14, 2018 5:06 pm

Siika wrote:I think you could simply extend the freeze function to a single clip, apply the same colour scheme to denote that the clip is frozen, and there ya go.
Combining frozen and unfrozen parts on the same arrangement track would be problematic because of the conflicts between deactivated and activated effect plugins (the state of something being frozen vs. the state of the chain being calculated in realtime). An alternative, additional "quick render on the fly" function would be very cool, just not to be tangled up with the freezing functionality ;)

A quick render function like this would let you select a clip and, for example, holding a key modifier drag that selection somewhere else, rendering that selection on the fly when releasing the drag. Another way to do this (one I've been thinking about before, a design that could have nice additional touches added to it) is having a dedicated "quick render slot/zone/holder" neatly in the GUI somewhere. Basically, you could have functions like "render clip into quick holder", "render time selection into quick holder", and so on, in the relevant context menus. If you'd like to "freeze" a certain clip in the arrangement, to be used somewhere else, you could just right click that clip and render it into that quick render slot. Then you would have a visual cue there, that you have material stashed in the holder :), and you could drag it from there where ever you'd like. "Render to clipboard" -- another cool thing to have -- would be somewhat similar, but instead of losing that content when copying something else during a routine edit, the holder content would be more persistent.

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Wed May 16, 2018 6:28 pm

antic604 wrote:
Nokatus wrote:Combining frozen and unfrozen parts on the same arrangement track would be problematic because of the conflicts between deactivated and activated effect plugins (the state of something being frozen vs. the state of the chain being calculated in realtime). An alternative, additional "quick render on the fly" function would be very cool, just not to be tangled up with the freezing functionality ;)
Bitwig and Reaper deal with this just fine, so it's more like a challenge than an impossibility :)
If by "this" you mean what I wrote in that quote, then hmm, no I don't think they do that :). If that really is what you mean, you are perhaps confusing the above with some other functionality.

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Stromkraft » Wed May 16, 2018 7:15 pm

antic604 wrote:[

Bitwig and Reaper deal with this just fine, so it's more like a challenge than an impossibility :)
If this is true why would you freeze clips if there are no resources saved? What's the gain?
Make some music!

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Stromkraft » Thu May 17, 2018 5:49 am

@antic604, I'm not following. As I understood the suggestion it's about freezing everything in a few clips rather than all clips in a track.

While freezing just the instruments would be very welcome I think that's a different suggestion? I assume I missed something, so please clarify.
Make some music!

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Thu May 17, 2018 7:47 am

antic604 wrote:So in this particular case, when running the track, FM-4 and 5 nested FX get dynamically replaced by audio sample, so they don't consume CPU cycles and they're turned back on as soon as MIDI shows up.
Thanks for taking the time to demonstrate that, it really is quite cool and I wasn't aware of this functionality :). I'm left wondering if it's indeed possible to switch devices on the fly like that in Reaper as well -- that's the one I have quite a bit of experience with, and I haven't bumped into a feature like this.

There are some things that still make it problematic, though, as I was thinking of cases where the effects following the instrument (or the instrument itself) produce a tail/release beyond the MIDI clip boundaries. So if you have multiple subsequent clips of MIDI data, side by side, and you want to freeze just one in the middle, on the fly, the freeze function needs to account for the tail section that doesn't actually overlap the timespan of the actual clip. This can be solved elegantly though, and probably already is.
antic604 wrote:So yes, it's possible to combine "frozen and unfrozen parts on the same arrangement track" and it's not "problematic". Actually it's quite amazing :P
I agree it's very cool. I'm using the word "problematic" in the sense of "non-trivial." As in, it poses actual problem cases to solve, and can also be challenging depending on the underlying architecture, so that it's not merely a straightforward incremental change to an existing feature (for example, in Live one track cannot host both MIDI and audio data, and starting to solve for a freeze function that activates and deactivates devices on the fly also needs a different underlying track/routing design to begin with). Naturally I'm not implying that it's at all impossible :). If something's impossible, as in requests that would need DSP that has data from the future (that does happen), haha, then that's the appropriate word.

Cheers!

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Thu May 17, 2018 9:08 am

antic604 wrote:BTW, this is also available in Bitwig - I can grab the clip, drag it with a modifier (I think it's Alt, not 100% sure) further down the same track or to a completely different track and the instrument (+nested FX) will bo bounced to audio.
And oh, that is so freezingly cool it approaches absolute zero :D

Badum tshh

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Thu May 17, 2018 11:22 am

antic604 wrote:Well, actually - Bitwig has an aptly called Time Shift device that can delay your signal or move it forward in time (by delaying everything else). Really clever and useful (eg. to do a look-ahead compressor):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQfSwv_bcSE
Hehe, yes I'm of course aware of actual look ahead techniques, but that's (obviously) not a request that requires physically seeing into the future, in the impossible sense ;)

Nokatus
Posts: 1068
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:06 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Nokatus » Thu May 17, 2018 2:35 pm

antic604 wrote:Yes, but that was just a typical use case.

You can for example send the sound to Reverb, but then use Time Shift to delay the actual sound source so you're reverb will sound before the signal it responds to.
That's very cool :) and also a technique I use in Live using Max based routing (and perfectly possible, so not what I was talking about -- but cool).

Stromkraft
Posts: 7033
Joined: Wed Jun 25, 2014 11:34 am

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Stromkraft » Fri May 18, 2018 3:10 pm

Stromkraft wrote:@antic604, I'm not following. As I understood the suggestion it's about freezing everything in a few clips rather than all clips in a track.

While freezing just the instruments would be very welcome I think that's a different suggestion? I assume I missed something, so please clarify.
Yeah… Though I think of this as "freeze in place" (like the original "Bounce in place"). At the moment Live tracks are either MIDI or audio, so it's not a trivial change that is requested then, coming to think of it.

I do think this could be a very useful feature indeed.
Make some music!

Siika
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:15 pm

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Siika » Sat Jun 23, 2018 5:14 pm

Wowza, back a year later. @Antic604, you get me. @Stromkraft, I agree that this feature is at odds with the current nature of Live's audio and midi tracks. The Bounce clip to audio context menu option sounds like a suitable solution. I am, however, intrigued by the possibility of having one track capable of handling midi and audio like antic showed us was possible in Bitwig and Reaper.

I hope this feature gets pushed.

Cheers!

Siika
Posts: 21
Joined: Mon Feb 13, 2017 10:15 pm

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Siika » Mon Feb 11, 2019 7:23 pm

BUMP!

Mangrove
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Sep 20, 2015 1:18 pm

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Mangrove » Sat Apr 02, 2022 11:17 am

Well it could be fairly easy,
Right click on clip, fast render to new track.
But it just doesn't exists right now, or does it?

antic604
Posts: 48
Joined: Mon Sep 21, 2020 1:32 pm

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by antic604 » Wed Apr 06, 2022 11:25 am

Mangrove wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 11:17 am
Well it could be fairly easy,
Right click on clip, fast render to new track.
But it just doesn't exists right now, or does it?
You can add a new audio track, set it's input to "Resampling", arm that track, solo the source track(s) and hit record.

I believe there's M4L device that does all of that for you:
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/4 ... e-in-place

Mangrove
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun Sep 20, 2015 1:18 pm

Re: Freeze clips (rather than the entire track)

Post by Mangrove » Thu Apr 14, 2022 2:24 pm

antic604 wrote:
Wed Apr 06, 2022 11:25 am
Mangrove wrote:
Sat Apr 02, 2022 11:17 am
Well it could be fairly easy,
Right click on clip, fast render to new track.
But it just doesn't exists right now, or does it?
You can add a new audio track, set it's input to "Resampling", arm that track, solo the source track(s) and hit record.

I believe there's M4L device that does all of that for you:
https://maxforlive.com/library/device/4 ... e-in-place
Awesome find!
Thnx :)

Post Reply