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Freezing tracks in Logic - how many at a time?

S

Soundhound

Senior Member
Does freezing multiple tracks in Logic increase the chance of errors/pushing the cpu too hard etc? Do you freeze one track at a time? If multiple is there a number you would tend not to go above?

I’m on. 2021 M1 Macbook Pro max
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babylonwaves said:
Freezing is an offline process. You can freeze as many tracks as you like.
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It's only "offline" with respect to computation (CPU usage) but not necessarily with respect to sample I/O. TLDR: I generally assume I can only freeze/bounce the same number of instruments as I can play in real-time.

A more reasoned answer:
When playing in real-time, the DAW will display a "system overload" message if plugins don't process audio quickly enough to produce a continuous audio signal. "Offline", in this case, means non-real-time: the plugins can take longer process audio, and the DAW will wait. This lets you render audio from a synth or effect that would be too CPU-intensive to run in real-time.

The problem is that sample players are (generally!) limited by I/O - loading samples - not CPU. Yet they (generally!) don't wait for the sample data to arrive before emitting audio. Instead, they keep delivering audio to the DAW on time, and build it out of whatever they've got: you don't get a "system overload", but the audio may contain crackles and pops from incompletely-loaded samples cutting in and out.

So, unless your sample player has a special mode for offline bounces - anyone know any examples? - frozen audio will contain those same crackling sounds when you bounce/freeze more instruments than your memory/disk can manage.
 
aldous said:
So, unless your sample player has a special mode for offline bounces - anyone know any examples?
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Seems like Kontakt does. And also seems like there recently was a problem with it that @EvilDragon found a fix for (Great work, thanks a lot!):

Kontakt VST3 cutting off long notes randomly when bouncing to audio???

I've looked, and I couldn't see any code that would do this specifically for VST3 only... The actual voice processing code is plugin type agnostic and supports up to 16 threads. This is obvious speculation, but the Kontakt VST3 could have failed to cleanly enter bounce mode, making it subject...
vi-control.net vi-control.net
 
MartinH. said:
Seems like Kontakt does. And also seems like there recently was a problem with it that @EvilDragon found a fix for (Great work, thanks a lot!)
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Oh, nice... that may explain why I've heard it go both ways (not that I use many Kontakt instruments.) I just assumed that Kontakt provided the facilities, but that it was up to each instrument's developer to script in an offline-friendly way.
 
aldous said:
It's only "offline" with respect to computation (CPU usage) but not necessarily with respect to sample I/O. TLDR: I generally assume I can only freeze/bounce the same number of instruments as I can play in real-time.
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From what I can see, you're wrong.
 
I believe I might be wrong too... it's the people who don't that worry me. :) Sounds like you feel I've pissed on your bonfire somehow...? That wasn't my intention. I gave an answer with my reasoning exactly so nobody has to believe me: if it makes sense to them, that's great; if they see a bug - i.e. new information - that's even better.

FWIW, I can't say what proportion of players behave one way versus the other, and that seems like the most likely bug. I've not tried all of them. Maybe I've just been unlucky.
 
aldous said:
I believe I might be wrong too... it's the people who don't that worry me. :) Sounds like you feel I've pissed on your bonfire somehow...? That wasn't my intention.
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Aldous, look, I'm not feeling like this at all. You're entitled to your opinion. I didn't come here to discuss things with you, I just wanted to help the OP. If there would be a general issue with sampler instruments and offline processing, I'm sure you'd read about it on this forum first. Peace.
 
aldous said:
It's only "offline" with respect to computation (CPU usage) but not necessarily with respect to sample I/O. TLDR: I generally assume I can only freeze/bounce the same number of instruments as I can play in real-time.

A more reasoned answer:
When playing in real-time, the DAW will display a "system overload" message if plugins don't process audio quickly enough to produce a continuous audio signal. "Offline", in this case, means non-real-time: the plugins can take longer process audio, and the DAW will wait. This lets you render audio from a synth or effect that would be too CPU-intensive to run in real-time.

The problem is that sample players are (generally!) limited by I/O - loading samples - not CPU. Yet they (generally!) don't wait for the sample data to arrive before emitting audio. Instead, they keep delivering audio to the DAW on time, and build it out of whatever they've got: you don't get a "system overload", but the audio may contain crackles and pops from incompletely-loaded samples cutting in and out.

So, unless your sample player has a special mode for offline bounces - anyone know any examples? - frozen audio will contain those same crackling sounds when you bounce/freeze more instruments than your memory/disk can manage.
Click to expand...
Thank you, most informative and helpful to a problem I'm having
 
Thanks. I thought I’d noticed some clicks/pops at times when freezing, maybe when freezing a group of tracks. i’ll have a look at kontakt evil dragon thread since i use a lot of kintact instances
 
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