Hi,

Is there any way for me to reclaim some cpu by freezing a bus? Let me explain,

I usually record my audio guitar tracks 'dry' then effect them on a bus i.e. Track 1 has the audio data, its routed to Bus 1 which has an amp sim in its effects bin amongst other things.

Now I can freeze all of my soft synths and get some cpu back - but is there a similar process for busses?

Can I easily bounce down the bus to a spare audio track, then somehow 'switch off' the effects on the original bus temporarily?

Cheers!

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.

ORIGINAL: hairyjamie

Hi,

Is there any way for me to reclaim some cpu by freezing a bus? Let me explain,

I usually record my audio guitar tracks 'dry' then effect them on a bus i.e. Track 1 has the audio data, its routed to Bus 1 which has an amp sim in its effects bin amongst other things.

Now I can freeze all of my soft synths and get some cpu back - but is there a similar process for busses?

Can I easily bounce down the bus to a spare audio track, then somehow 'switch off' the effects on the original bus temporarily?

Cheers!

You can do a bouncedown - by soloing only those tracks/busses you want (like the guitar and its bus).
But that's not the same as "freeze". However, once you bouncedown, you can ARCHIVE the guitar track.

That will at least get you back some cycles without losing the original track and bus.
You can also right click in the bus FX - if you use any FX there - and select "bypass"

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?

SONAR needs to go the same route as ProTools and just get rid of the distinction between tracks and busses so that they can all be mixed together.

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.

ORIGINAL: ChristopherM

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.

Would a freeze actually work on a bus? I mean practically. As soon as you change the send level or the level of a track the input characteristics to the plug changes so you've had to unfreeze every time you made a change.

Say you had a reverb on a bus and maybe 6 tracks with sends to that bus, if you changed the send level on one of the tracks you have to unfreeze first then freeze again every time you made a change.

If you're only using the bus for a one-to-one relationship with the track, and the intention is to freeze, why not just put it on the track and freeze it. Or even on all guitar tracks and freeze them.

Maybe I'm missing something ...

Dude

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.

Would a freeze actually work on a bus?

Well, by definition, freeze implies that you can no longer change the bus (until it's thawed) which implies that upstream changes also will have no effect. But that's presumably what you want to achieve, or at least it's the price you would have to pay for achieving the OP's desired reduction in CPU load. I would assume that freezing a bus would in practice also freeze any tracks that feed that bus, meaning that any CPU load from those tracks would also reduce. However, I can already hear the objections from those who use what I would call "non-deterministic" plug-ins, where their output is not necessarily the same at each pass. I can't see it working any other way, however.

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