On this forum I often see reference to "freezing" audio tracks, usually in order to fix some problem in playback.
 
Now, my understanding of "freezing", is in relation to midi tracks, where the "freezing" is actually rendering the midi track to audio. So, why "freeze" an already audio track?
 
I have experimented with "freezing" audio but see no difference in the waveform or sound of the clip. It can't be to prevent further manipulation of the clip, because it can still be edited. So why?
 
What am I overlooking here?

It will temporarily print any effects to the clip and disable them to free up resources. It's like an easily reversible bounce/render.
 
Cheers.

Doh, of course!
Does it for midi, so makes sense to do it for audio as well.
Thanks Beep
 

No prob. I rarely use Freeze myself though. Mostly I just clone my tracks, delete all the extra takes and other gack then archive/hide the originals. For MIDI tracks I get it solid, clone, bounce and then archive/hide the originals. That way after I'm done writing/tracking I'm just working with the necessary material for mixing but can still go back if I need to. Might be a little weird but it works for me.
 
Cheers.

I've never had to freeze any tracks so far, this may change now I have u-he diva although I can run about 6 instances before hitting CPU overload...I do like to keep everthing 'live' so it can all be tweaked at any time.

When I need to freeze tracks I know it's time to buy a faster CPU.

One thing that probably doesn't REALLY matter but tweaks at my crazy little brain is subtle changes in synth reaction during MIDI playback and delay/reverb type effects. Freezing/bouncing to lock all those kinds of things in place seems like a good idea for consistency while doing final mixing/eqing.
 
I mostly just worry about my drum synths due to anti-machine gun settings and whatnot.

I expect that in a couple of decades people will be asking, "Why would you put fuel in the car's gas tank?" Back in the dark ages when working with audio applications had to be interrupted for mastodon hunts, we used to need to freeze tracks so that the computer could do all the math without breaking the data stream.
 
Arguably it would still be useful to bounce a track to audio, or freeze it if for example one of your live tracks had an effect with a look-ahead buffer, and you felt you really needed to hear that effect while recording or mixing real time without introducing unacceptable latency.

Well, I thought I was missing something important, or doing things wrong. The type of music I do is mostly all audio with some midi piano and drums, which of course need to be frozen to be rendered to audio.
 
I don't usually have high track counts and I don't normally have many plugins happening at once, so I have never run out of computing power. I guess I'll just carry on as normal until I hit the wall and then I'll know what to do.

I freeze pretty much all tracks I'm not presently working on. It's just one click to either freeze or unfreeze to adjust as needed.

Here's a simple example. Add an amp sim to a guitar track. Then pile on some effects within that amp sim. That can end up as a serious CPU hit for just that one track if you really take advantage of a bunch of the amp sim's features. But, if you freeze it you get all the sound without a hit on the CPU.

Better yet, put the amp sim in an FX Chain bin in the ProChannel. Throw on some ProChannel modules and get the track sounding super awesome. Then freeze the track (one click). Again, you get all the super sound with no hit on the CPU. So including all the ProChannel processing and a full-on tricked out amp sim sound, you can end up with a simple audio track but which is totally optimized.

Rinse and repeat throughout the tracks of the song. At the end you still have lots of CPU room to pile on live effects in the busses when mixing and even mastering.