Key Of Grey

August 20th, 2010 – Lately I’ve been working on fixing an old Powerbook. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I’m thinking that it might be cool to build it into a dedicated live rig. I remember when I got it and installed Logic for the first time. I was super excited to try out my new production rig. Imagine my disappointment when within the first 5 minutes I experienced a core audio overload; my shiny new (at the time) Powerbook just couldn’t handle the plugins and software instruments I used.

When I was recording on magnetic tape reels, we didn’t have to worry about processing power. We could put as many effects as we had on a track as we recorded. The downside was that the effects were “printed” onto the audio permanently, so if we wanted to change it, we’d have to re-record it and hopefully we kept the original audio.

Freezing tracks in a DAW is the modern equivalent of printing effects. In Logic, you simply insert the plugins and effects to a track, and when you’re happy with the result, you freeze the track. What Logic does in the background is basically re-record the audio for the track with the effects on it, and then disables the live rendering of the same track. What you’re left with is just plain audio that doesn’t take up extra processing power because the effects are recorded directly into the audio. If you want to change your plugin settings, you un-freeze the track, make your changes and freeze it again. The original frozen audio will be deleted and replaced with a recording of the new settings.

Track freezing is available in some other DAWs but if you don’t have that option, you can manually perform the same steps. Create a new track, and feed the track you want to freeze into its input. Then arm the new track and press record. The new track you just created will record the output of the original track with all its effects, into a standard audio file. Next, disable your original track (in Protools this will both mute the original, and disable the plugins so that you conserve processing power), and you will be left with the same audio as if the plugins were being processed live, but at a huge processing power savings.

For engineers that have a slow system, freezing tracks is necessary to do any work at all but even if you have a powerful computer, you can utilize freezing to save your processing power. You might use the extra power for crazy routing, or to handle additional tracks. It’s always good to have some processing headroom.