[Ardour-Users] Freeze a track?

[Sampo Savolainen]

On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 19:56 -0800, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> On 31 December 2008 at 15:40, Kevin Cosgrove <kevinc at cosgroves.us> wrote:
> 
> > What does "freeze" do in the edit window?  I'm wanting a feature 
> > which puts a track into a state where I can't edit it until I take it 
> > out of that state.  Ideally, all the plugins, etc, would also be 
> > uneditable while in this state.  Is "freeze" the right feature?
> > If not, is there a feature to do this?
> 
> It looks like plugins do "freeze" the way I was hoping for.  But, I 
> can't understand why the volume of the frozen track changes when it 
> gets frozen.  Some are frozen quite a bit louder, some quieter, and 
> this is also visible in the waveform graphic for the associated 
> track.  The volume returns to the original settings when tracks are 
> unfrozen.

Hi,

The why:

Imagine a track with post fader plugins. Those plugins might be linear
(reverbs, delays) but they could also be non-linear like distortion or
compression. These effects are gain sensitive. As the main fader acts as
a input gain for the post fader redirects, also the fader needs to be
"frozen". 

The question:

Ardour usually steers towards being "perfect" in cases like this. But
one could argue that in this case we outsource the risk. We could let
the user move the fader and just tell them in the manual that fader
movements on frozen tracks with non-linear post fader effects will not
sound like what it would sound unfrozen.

I'd love to hear what the users think about this- Should we make this
part imperfect?


 Happy 2009!
  Sampo