Hi Guys I think I'm pretty close to understanding things but despite all of my reading i still just need to ask and make sure i'm correct with my interpretation
 
-is there a difference between freezing a synth or freezing a track?  they seem to do the same thing?
-is there a difference between freezing and bouncing other than one being permanent and the other not?  if no difference, why would anyone ever bother to bounce when you can freeze and keep that option open?
-what am i really losing in terms of adjusting and flexibility etc when i freeze a track/synth?  i've played around and see that if i alter the midi i need to unfreeze/re-freeze to hear my changes.
 
is freezing essentially "turning off" a track or synth temporarily?  as if to say "i've made all the tweaks i need to this synth/track right now and so i can freeze it to save cpu while i work on other stuff.....but if i need to come back and adjust that's no problem at all - just unfreeze"?
 
all said i have tracks etc. that i'm not really bothering with right now....but later might want to come back and put the final touches on them.....no problem to just freeze away as unfreezing is as if nothing ever happened?
 
 
 
tremendous help from you guys the past week a huge door has been opening for me - it's amazing!
 
 

I have found I never had to freeze midi tracks, I'm not a power user I guess. I will have mostly a bunch of (midi) tracks for each drum part and I will use both TTs-1 and Session drummer. I use TTS-1 for the kick because then I can put reverb on Session drummer. 
I might use TTs-1 for organ too. 
Then I might have True Pianos or Mr Tramp or various traditional keyboard sounds via 3rd party plugs. . 
The most I might have is 4 things in my synth rack and a dozen midi tracks. The rest will be audio. Then I'll be using a dozen efxs for the audio portion. I don't have a powerful computer either It's Pentium D 3.4 duo core and 4 Gigs of RAM. It has never gone past 25%. So I think Freezing is good for people with a lot of stuff going on and depends on which synths or efxs you choose. Some are very hungry. Bouncing as you have figured is only when you have made the decision that a track is "done". 

seed
 
-is there a difference between freezing a synth or freezing a track?  they seem to do the same thing?

Freezing a synth is usually taken to mean only freezing the sound generated by the synth. Freezing a track involves applying the effects while the synth is frozen.
 

seed
-is there a difference between freezing and bouncing other than one being permanent and the other not?

There was a time when the freeze function did not exist. Freezing does bounce the track in place and removes the synth (and effects if the option is selected) from memory. Bouncing does nothing to the original track(s). Before the freeze option was added to SONAR, bounce and archive was the technique used to achieve a result similar to freeze.
 

seed
if no difference, why would anyone ever bother to bounce when you can freeze and keep that option open?

Reducing resource requirements is only one result of freezing (or bounce and archive). There is nothing permanent about a bounce, all a bounce does is create a new track; the original tracks are untouched. Some find mixing easier when exclusively working with audio. Some synth patches have a random component to them. It may be easier to work with a static audio copy of a synth's random output. There are those that copy the frozen audio to another track instead of bouncing.
 

seed
-what am i really losing in terms of adjusting and flexibility etc when i freeze a track/synth?  i've played around and see that if i alter the midi i need to unfreeze/re-freeze to hear my changes.

Nothing, it is just a way of generating an audios tracks.
 
 

seed
is freezing essentially "turning off" a track or synth temporarily?  as if to say "i've made all the tweaks i need to this synth/track right now and so i can freeze it to save cpu while i work on other stuff.....but if i need to come back and adjust that's no problem at all - just unfreeze"?
 
 
all said i have tracks etc. that i'm not really bothering with right now....but later might want to come back and put the final touches on them.....no problem to just freeze away as unfreezing is as if nothing ever happened?
 

Yes. But taken to the extreme, it is not hard to imagine creating a project that would not run if tracks were thawed.
 

shoot.....i'm not as close to understanding as i thought lol
 
-so in a way "step A" is freezing the sound from the synth - and a full freeze step B would be freezing that audio track and any effects applied to it?  i have only simple instrument tracks set up and i think this throws me off my grasp of things quite often.
-i think you are saying that bounce and freeze are essentially the same thing.  but that makes me wonder why this would be the case idk.
-are you suggesting that if i freeze all of the synths/tracks i'm not using that i might just run into a glitch or bug that renders a component or my whole project to be corrupt?
 
my goal and to what cactus is referencing is simply reduce consumption because i'm running into sonar.exe or whatever crashes as well as the occasional rapture.exe error etc.....  have to reboot usually all that good stuff!
 
i forget how to see what kind of processor i have, but i have 4 gig of ram and a good m-audio soundcard
running 64bit version 8.5
 
right now i have like 19 single instrument tracks and each are a soft synth instance.
i thought i was going to be able to use channels etc like on TTS-1 but it turns out that all of these don't have that option.  i am using a lot of dimension pro but i read that the 4 channels don't really work the way TTS-1 would?
 
ANYways.......i'm just trying to figure out the best way to reduce consumption while not writing too much in stone as i go along
 
 
thanks guys
 
 
 

Actually I thought your initial post had a good grasp of freeze and bounce+archive.
 
Look at the freeze options. There is a check box which is selected by default which should freeze the effects with the synth. It should not require extra freeze step, just check the options you want.
 
From a computer resource perspective, freeze and bounce+archive do the same thing. There are other motivations for bouncing tracks but if all you are interested in doing is free up memory and CPU, freeze will do it.
 
In General, frozen tracks can always be thawed to make changes. No need to worry about glitches or corruption from freeze but it is possible to keep adding stuff to a project and use optimizing tricks like freezing until nothing else can be added to the project. At that point, the project will not be corrupted but it may not play if a track is thawed. IOW, it is always possible to create a project larger than a machine can handle.
 
DimPro can be multi-tibral but it is not as flexible as TTS-1. With 4GB of RAM there is not much difference running the 64bit version of SONAR vs. 32bit version. If you are running many instances of synths that load samples in RAM such as DimPro and Session Drummer, adding another 4GB of RAM may be a good idea.

oh you know i would love to.....but i'm at capacity for my mobo :(
 
ok i see what you're saying....essentially that if i froze so much and tried to unfreeze all of it....that the project would be so massive it would be crippled.
totally makes sense and i think my idea is that i would be unfreezing pieces at a time - never unfreezing everything all at once.
 
 
one last question for now - when i'm slamming my cpu etc it has to do with everything playing at that moment correct?  what i mean is....if i were to selectively freeze some tracks to help out with the crashing, my best bet would be to freeze some tracks that are at a point where alot of synths/effects are working at the same time?  i do notice a certain point in my tune where it seems to fail the most often.
 
freezing say an intro only track that lasts the first 45 seconds wouldn't have any impact on the load my CPU is taking say 3 minutes into the tune.  correct?
 
 
 
as you can see i'm not too PC smart heheh
if it wasn't for folks like yourself i would pretty much know nothing so as always thanks man!
 

seedtotally makes sense and i think my idea is that i would be unfreezing pieces at a time - never unfreezing everything all at once.

Luckily, there is no way to unfreeze everything at once to run into that scenario, unfreezing happens on a softsyth by softsynth basis or audio track by audio track basis.
 
 
 

seedone last question for now - when i'm slamming my cpu etc it has to do with everything playing at that moment correct?  what i mean is....if i were to selectively freeze some tracks to help out with the crashing, my best bet would be to freeze some tracks that are at a point where alot of synths/effects are working at the same time?  i do notice a certain point in my tune where it seems to fail the most often.

 
The more synths that are actively being used, the more cpu cycles are being taken.
 
 
 

seedfreezing say an intro only track that lasts the first 45 seconds wouldn't have any impact on the load my CPU is taking say 3 minutes into the tune.  correct?

Even though the softsynth isn't being used after the first 45 seconds, it is taking up some cpu resources unless it's a vst3 softsynth and you're using Sonar X3. Therefore, freezing it would give back some of your cpu cycles.

seed - here's my approach to it.

I look at freezing as an advantage to minimize hits on the CPU so I can use the CPU capacity for other stuff, like mixing and mastering.

Wherever possible, once I have something on a track that's good, I'll usually freeze it. For example, this could be a guitar track that has an amp sim on it.

After freezing I then create a blank audio track routed to an appropriate bus - like say a Guitar bus.

Next I copy the frozen track and paste it into the new audio track. I then mute the frozen track.

With this method I can apply automation and all sorts of stuff to the audio track.

Why wouldn't I just use the frozen track? Well, if you decide to change anything in the source behind the frozen track, in other words if you need to unfreeze the frozen track, you'll lose all your edits.

With this method:
1) you still have all the non destructive aspects of the freeze action,
2) you get unnecessary processing out of the CPU (like the amp sim generating the guitar tone, or a softsynth patch generating its sound) and
3) you don't lose your audio track edits if you unfreeze.

So pardon the pun, but it's cool.

WRT managing CPU load, it might a case of rethinking the workflow. It sounds like tracks are being built up sequentially with effects added while new tracks are still being added. The is the worst case for CPU management. It precludes the ability to raise mixing latency. Raising latency reduces CPU load. A better way to work may be to track as much as possible. Then when tracking is complete, raise the latency to reduce CPU load. Then add effects. Without the ability to raise latency, you will be forced to freeze sooner and requires a better knowledge of the resource requirements of the plug-ins.
 
It is hard to definitely say what the impacts of freezing the intro would have on the rest of the project but if the intro is complete, freeze it. It can't hurt and might help.

great stuff guys this all helps much
 
scook.....i actually haven't added any effects yet :(
i have 19 tracks, 19 instances of a soft synth since none of them are multi timbral except for tts-1 which i'm using only once
 
idk about the resources a given instrument uses if they are all the same or what but there are some i'm using that have all kinds of phasing/delay/reverb/lfo etc....all of that built into the preset patch.  so perhaps they are just "heavier" instruments i'm choosing?
 
to clarify what bitflipper was saying earlier.....i find my CPU hovers regularly from like 20%-25% and i've seen it as high as 27%.  so knowing very little as i do.....for all i know my PC is just not cutting it or my install is messed up i have no idea.
 
i only know that what i have to work with is all i have :)
 
hopefully if i freeze anything i'm not currently working on i'll get less crashing
it's not happening so often that i'm losing my mind....but it's still enough to be an annoyance and imo just too frequent whether it's the limitations of what i have or something i'm doing myself
 
i haven't touched latency/buffer stuff as i'm always afraid of some how permanently screwing things up for myself =P
 
ah great week for me educationally guys thanks so much
i can't wait to share my first tune here so yall can here the track you were a part of making ;)