I guess the easiest way to explain all of this is to start with why I am running into this conundrum. I use the virtual synthesizer Omnisphere for a lot of my stuff, and the only downside to that is that it is incredibly CPU hungry, and I will generally have many different tracks with Omnisphere loaded on them. So naturally, using all of these different instances of Omnisphere I start running out of processing power and I start having to increase my buffer size until I just can't take the latency anymore. At that point I start freezing tracks.
This is where it gets complicated. I really like a lot of the built in effects that Omnisphere has, and a lot of these effects make all sorts of reverb and delay tails at the end of midi clips. The problem with freezing these clips is that I can't put any of those effects on sends because they are built into the virtual synthesizer itself. So in this case I have no choice but to deal with these tails as waveforms instead of having them render in real-time. This would all be fine and dandy if I weren't getting audio clicks on my freezes.
Now I've done a decent amount of research on this topic, so I know that when Live freezes clips it doubles their length and loops the second half so the loop will contain the tail that hangs over (this is annoying to me in that there is no reverb tail audio that is devoid of the rest of the loop, so when you stop a clip at the end it will stop abruptly, when instead it could play the fitting reverb tail that it rendered with the beginning of the loop). The audio clicks that I am getting post-freeze are happening during the looping phase. So for example, if I freeze a 4 bar clip, the frozen product will be an 8 bar clip, and during playback the 8 bar clip will play seamlessly until it loops back to the 5th bar. After this an audio click occurs every 4 bars because it is looping that same part.
What I have realized about Live's clip freeze technique is that when a clip is frozen, the "fade" option (where it applies a ~4ms fade at the start and end of each clip) is not applied to it. What I mean by this is that when you flatten a frozen track, you'll notice that the audio clips that you get out of it don't have the "fade" option activated. So when I flatten a frozen track and select that option it gets rid of any high-frequency audio clicks. This however is not my main problem, just a minor complaint because I can simply flatten tracks and select the "fade" option to get rid of any of those clicks.
My real problem, however, is that the effects I really like in Omnisphere tend to make the sound evolve in a way that by the time the audio reaches the point where it needs to start looping, it is slightly different than the audio that it is going to be looped around to. This creates a problem because when the audio is looped there is a noticeable difference in the sound of what came before and after the loop and it creates a sort of popping sound (usually).
So my question is: Is there some sort of workaround for this?
The thing for me is that I want to eventually start playing live and trying to get gigs and whatnot, and in order to do that I absolutely cannot have latency, so I can't be running a large setup of Omnisphere plugins while I'm performing. I also would rather avoid doing a whole lot of things in arrangement view and keep it completely on session view.
A possible workaround I have come up with is potentially using a drum rack. The way I would do this is to render each clip individually without looping them, and put them in a drum rack and set the release time really high and just draw in midi notes where the clips should play. This works alright but the problem with it is that when you attempt to stop a clip it will play for the rest of the release time, which ends up sounding like complete crap. So the other work around is to have a very short release time and instead use up two drum rack slots per clip and alternate them with long midi notes (however long you would need them because the clip plays as long as the midi note is held). This works, however it is really a lot of work and incredibly annoying to set up, especially if I have a whole bunch of clips in a track. And so far from what I have gathered you can't layer audio clips over one another in the same track, so I'm completely stumped.
But yeah that's my problem, so if anyone can help me out at all it would be greatly appreciated!!!
And sorry for how long-winded this was!