Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER?

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vaultwit
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2011/08/18 22:51:43 (permalink)

Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER?

I always thought the purpose of freezing tracks was to make the project more CPU efficient, by letting all the live effects in the FX bin of the tracks to take a break (the tradeoff being you can't edit the track).

However, it seems to me that the more tracks I freeze, the LESS my CPU efficiency is. I froze a whole bunch of tracks, and afterwards, theres a condiserably noticeable lag after pressing play and when the Sonar actually starts playing ("processing" time). This was not the case when all my tracks were unfrozen--playback was instant.

Can someone clear this up for me?
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    bluzdog
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/18 23:08:36 (permalink)
    Freezing should save rescources. Sounds like a problem to me.
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    brundlefly
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/18 23:48:58 (permalink)
    Freezing takes load off your CPU, but increases load on your disks. Audio is always streamed, and buffering up the audio takes some time, and can add a delay to the startup time. It shouldn't really be that noticeable on a desktop with fast, modern drives, though. You might want to check out your disk performance. If you have so-called "green" energy-conserving drives, the variable read speed may be causing you some trouble.

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    JazzSinger
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/19 05:19:24 (permalink)
    I had a X1b project use more CPU than other projects (but not significantly different - same band, same evening of takes).

    When it began to stutter, dropout and stop, I decided to freeze tracks, disable effects and PC, etc.

    It really didn't make much difference, and the only solution was to start a fresh project and copy all tracks and settings across.

    No, saving as bundle didn't help.

    So I think there is some sort of bug that people with newer, faster machines are unlikely to ever encounter.
     
    Edit: I did feel it had something to do with PC, because I had been using Sonar plugins up til then (vintage, drums channelstrips) and decided to try the PC; but I have not been able to repeat the phenomenon and therefore this is pure speculation.
    post edited by JazzSinger - 2011/08/19 05:24:14
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    John
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/19 08:57:16 (permalink)
    It was often the case using WDM drivers to use a higher buffer for playback.

    Its not so easy with ASIO. Often when one is getting drop outs a higher buffer is needed.

    Latency will increase but in playback that is not as important.

    A fast machine and very fast HDs will put off the need to freeze. But We are still free to bring our machines to its knees by adding more tracks and plugins.

    In the past I was careful in being as efficient as possible. Now I tend to throw a plugin in as I please.

    If one is using multi instances of plungins a buss may be a better way to go.   

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    John
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    brundlefly
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/19 11:10:41 (permalink)
    I think there is some sort of bug that people with newer, faster machines are unlikely to ever encounter.



    How not-new and not-fast is your machine? I'd have to go back to my single-core Celeron laptop with 5000rpm drives and 1GB RAM to get the symptoms you're describing with a sizeable project. My 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo with 7200rpm drives never exhibited this problem that I can recall.

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    bitflipper
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    Re:Freezing tracks makes CPU efficiency HIGHER or LOWER? 2011/08/19 12:51:49 (permalink)
    Freezing won't help much on straight audio tracks with no DSP. It could conceivably even increase disk overhead, from turning sparse clips into larger continuous files.

    However, I don't think the OP's symptoms are directly related to freezing. Lag time before playback commences is purely a function of buffer size. If you set your buffers very high, say to 4096 samples, you're going to experience almost one second lag between hitting the spacebar and playback starting (assuming 44.1KHz).


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