[Ardour-Users] Freeze a track?

[Sampo Savolainen]

On Thu, 2009-01-01 at 12:13 -0800, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> My expectation was that the fader, pan, routing, plugins, time
> placement, essentially all controls for the track, would be
> frozen in their current state.  It looked like that was the case
> in terms of controllability.  Is that what you've defined as the
> perfect case?  If so, that's what I want.

The user in me says that freezing would be done only to apply the
plugins and save the result. In order to either save cycles or to do a
mini-export (I sometimes do heavily effected stuff, freeze, unfreeze,
then use the frozen region on other tracks).

My point here being is that from the usability pov, I don't think the
user expects or wants the gain, pan or routing to be frozen.

> My confusion is that when I clicked to freeze the track, that the
> loudness instantly changed from where it was.  This was evident
> by the volume coming out of my speakers and was also reflected
> in the track's waveform display in the editor window.  Excuse me
> for being dense or stupid about this, but why should freezing
> the track change how loud it is?  Go ahead and get technical, if
> that's useful; I can handle it.  ;-)

Seems that all is not well in freeze-land. Seems there are bugs to be
fixed.. most likely that is due to the track fader being applied twice.


As a general comment, not directed directly at the post I'm answering:
I agree: "who reads manuals?" is in the middle of the whole question.
That's why it is handy and "easy" to keep the processing "perfect". This
way users don't come screaming to us when the post-fader distortion
effect doesn't work as expected when unfreezing as the user has used the
track fader. They do come screaming about not being able to move the
damn thing! :)

I sort of like the idea about only freezing pre-fader effects, but there
is one big issue with it. What plugins are resource heavy? Reverbs.
What's usually placed post-fader? Reverbs.

This is a classic example of how the ethos of making everything flexible
(like how you can have as many inputs and or outputs as you like) is
costly on the user interface side.


Tooltips or any other sort of online warning about what's happening
might be a good idea. What do you think of this solution:
 - Make the fader work for frozen tracks
 - Pop up a warning dialog when freezing a track with post 
   fader redirects. The dialog would have a checkbox to not 
   make it appear ever again.


 Sampo