Freeze Bus?

Unfortunately, this is a shortcoming of Sonar. One can neither freeze a bus nor route a bus to a track. There are only two ways to do this:

1. If you have an audio interface that can reroute audio internally (I have an E-Mu 1820M which can do this) then you can record the output of the bus onto a track.

2. The other way involves actually sending the audio out of the card then back into an input and capturing that, the downside being slight latency and a full D/A A/D cycle.

Put in a feature request, as this is definitely something that should be part of Sonar.

Cheers,

I was thinking of going down the bouncing route, I'll have to look into the archive functionality.

If I bypass an effect does it truly release all its load on the CPU though?

get rid of the distinction between tracks and busses

Absolutely! I suspect that (ironically enough) someone actually had to program in the existing distinction, presumably in accordance with a paradigm drawn from mixer hardware that said there must be a difference. I can't imagine that there is any technical reason for the constraints that exist today. But then, nor can I imagine why soft synth automation is different to any other kind of automation, and nor can I imagine why Step Sequencer clips behave so differently from other groove clips. So maybe the issue is my defective imagination.

The trick would be to get rid of the distinction, so that you could group together a set of tracks with one or more busses. Those buss would only show up as available targets for the tracks in the same group, so the whole group could be frozen and archived together. This would be very commonly desirable. If you look at how many busses you end up with for drum processing or vocals and whatnot, where the busses are always tied to a specific set of tracks, it would be very advantageous to be able to do this.

Other busses, such as reverbs and such, would need to remain there all the time of course.

ORIGINAL: droddey

The trick would be to get rid of the distinction, so that you could group together a set of tracks with one or more busses. Those buss would only show up as available targets for the tracks in the same group, so the whole group could be frozen and archived together. This would be very commonly desirable. If you look at how many busses you end up with for drum processing or vocals and whatnot, where the busses are always tied to a specific set of tracks, it would be very advantageous to be able to do this.

Other busses, such as reverbs and such, would need to remain there all the time of course.

Still doesn't make sense to me. Are you looking for a way to freeze multiple tracks at a time? Maybe freezing track folders? That would be cool! Click on a track folder, select freeze, and all tracks in the folder would be froozen.

How many busses do you have for drums? More then three? Maybe this is a workflow problem?

Dude

The way I see it is what is the point? If you freeze a bus what are you going to do with the project? Just play it over and over again? This is not the same as being able to record a bus to a track. Freezing would mean that no changes could be made of any sort. If one wants the equivalent of a frozen bus its called export.

BTW I can just hear all newbies wondering why they can no longer change the reverb on track 1 after freezing a bus. LOL

ORIGINAL: droddey

A very common scenario for drums is:

- Snare buss for two snare mics to go to
- Kick buss for two kick mics to go to
- Toms buss for the toms mics
- Cymbal buss for the cymbals to go to
- All of the above to to a parallel compression buss
- All of the above go to an overall drums bus

All of them tend to have processing on them, sometimes a considerable amount. Once you freeze the source drums (BFD for me), then none of those busses will be used since they exist purely to manage drums. So it makes perfect sense to be able to freeze them along with the tracks they serve, since they serve no purpose while their source tracks are frozen.

Really! You process the two mics on snare the same??? The two mics on the kick the same??? Same processing on all the toms?

I'm not using BFD, so I might be missing something (I usually got live drums). Unless BFD does not allow you, why not point them to individual tracks? You're not gaining that much from the busses. Then freeze the tracks ...

I agree with the drum bus, parallel, maybe overheads (but why not put that eq and comp on the individual tracks, those plugs are not that cpu hungry).

I usually have a send to a verb as well, but six busses for drums! A lot of engineers only use three mics to capture the whole kit!

ORIGINAL: droddey

The grouping feature would insure that it's obvious which busses can be frozen, becuase it would only happen if you froze the whole group and the grouping feature insures that only other tracks within that group could possibly be sending to the busses in the same group.

What do think would hapen if you changed the level on one of the tracks that were in this "group" sending to the froozen bus? I'll answear -- nothing!!! Because the bus is frozen. So, NO changes can happen on the tracks and the bus, like John said, that's called export. Just export the bus to a track.

Dude

ORIGINAL: droddey

No, they are EQ'd and sometimes compressed separately, but there is often common processing that's done on the buss, same with the other examples.

Enlighten me, what other in-line processing (outside eq and comp) would you do on snare and kick that could not been done on a track? You could always freeze the track! Do you have to send it to busses? Still seems like a workflow problem to me. I'll ask again, why not send the individual "mics" to tracks, then process and freeze the tracks? I'm not getting it ...

ORIGINAL: droddey
You couldn't, because the whole group is frozen at that point. That's the point of grouping them together. The busses only freeze if you freeze the whole group. At that point, the whole set of tracks and busses are frozen and can't be changed. It wouldn't be freezing in the sense of individual tracks, it's more like bouncing in place in that case when you freeze the whole group, but you don't have to manage a separate track to bounce to and you get rid of the processing on the grouped tracks and busses.

Well that is not how Freeze works in Sonar. You should be able to change level and pan even though it's froozen. You can't have a feature do two differnt things. How confusing whould that be? What you're asking for is an export-to-track that would automatically free up plugin resources and archive the tracks/bus.

Dude

In some of the "heavy" resource intensive project I've worked I made a folder called "Bus Bounces" and setup a track for each bus with the same routing and sends. Then when I need to free up resources I can just bounce a bus to the appropriate track, bypass the FX bin on that bus, and archive the tracks feeding it. They only thing you may need to adjust are send levels so they match the bus. However, if you're using pre-fader sends (mine are usually post-fader) you'll have to remember to temporarily set the bus output back to 0.0 before bouncing and set the track volume to match the bus volume so everything stays mixed the same. Then if I want to go back and change something on the bus then I just delete the clip the bus "track" and re-enable the bus and feeding tracks. And if you create the "Bus Bounces" folder in your templates then it's always there ready to go when needed.

The thing is that all this talk of freezing is becoming a dying issue as new hardware becomes more powerful. With all the dual/quad cores people will purchase in the coming years the need to freeze becomes less and less. Why spend resources working on such a complicated feature that users can fix by upgrading their hardware and may not even need in a couple years?

ORIGINAL: droddey

It's not that you can't do it, it's why shouldn't SONAR be improved such that you don't have to redundantly put processing on tracks when you really want to apply the same processing to both. You are acting like I'm attacking SONAR, when I'm just saying it would be very USEFUL it if were changed to allow you to use busses where it is convenient but not pay the price of having processig that can never be removed from memory even when it's not required.

That's one of the reasons for busses; to use that same "effect" for the multiple tracks. But, if your number of busses are reaching the number of tracks you're not using them effectively. I don't think you're attacking Sonar, but why add features to compensate for a workflow problem? You started with saying you wanted to freeze busses and I'm just pointing out that you're not using the program the most effecient way. If your plan is to freeze the bus (not having enough processing power), why not send them to tracks? Tracks can be frozen.

ORIGINAL: droddey
it would be very USEFUL it if were changed to allow you to use busses where it is convenient but not pay the price of having processig that can never be removed from memory even when it's not required.

I'll try one more time ... if you freeze a bus you can not change any of the tracks that point or send to the bus. Defeats the whole purpose of busses (as you said above).

ORIGINAL: droddey
Well yeh, that was the whole point of my suggestion above for a CHANGE in how SONAR works.

OK, but it's Export you want to add options to not change Freeze.

Again, I belive you're not using tracks/busses in a way that it was traditionally intended. The change you proposed to Freeze would change the way "most" of us are used to in a mixing environment.

Good luck, over and out!

Dude

ORIGINAL: droddey

The way I use busses for drums is completely normal.

Is that why you avoid answering my direct questions?

ORIGINAL: droddey
You obviously aren't understanding what I'm saying. The busses would be grouped with the tracks that use those busses, and those busses would ONLY be available (via sends) to the tracks in that group. So the whole group can be frozen. You couldn't make changes to the tracks because they FREEZE WITH THE BUSS.

OMG! Have you used the existing Freeze function on a track? When you Freeze a track you can still CHANGE LEVEL AND PAN! That's what's great about Freeze. With your changes to Freeze you would take that away. Because if you Freeze a bus you can't allow changes to level and pan of the tracks associated with the bus. You can't have the Freeze function do two different things.

Can't believe I'm still replying to this .

Dude

Can you route the bus to an aux track then freeze it?