[Ardour-Users] Freeze a track?

Kevin Cosgrove kevinc at cosgroves.us
Thu Jan 1 13:15:52 PST 2009


On 1 January 2009 at 22:52, Sampo Savolainen <v2 at iki.fi> wrote:

> 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).

I too have wanted exactly what you refer to above.  But...

> 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.

... I frequently mix multi-voice instruments which span multiple 
tracks.  The most common of these is a drumset.  In this case the 
relative volumes and pans between the tracks is quite important.  
Freezing in this situation doesn't save any on CPU cycles.  But,
it does prevent me from bumping the wrong control when I don't mean 
to.  Maybe this situation would call for a different feature, maybe 
named "lock" track, as opposed to "freeze" track?

> > 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.

I'll have a visit to mantis.  See, that wasn't overly technical, now 
was it?  ;-)

> 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

That would be OK for freeze, and oh so much better if there was an 
alternate "lock" feature to keep the fader immobile.  It would be OK 
to have a check button to select this in the freeze feature.  That 
would be my 2nd choice tho.

>  - 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.

No opinion.

Thanks!
 
--
Kevin





More information about the Ardour-Users mailing list