[Ardour-Users] Freeze a track?

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Jan 01, 2009 at 10:52:22PM +0200, Sampo Savolainen wrote:
> 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).

Another motivation for freezing is to provide some safety and
simplicity in a complex session; if a track is very heavily edited,
freezing the track prevents you from accidentally moving regions
around in time or in the layer height (not sure how to describe that
clearly, sorry).  And it reduces mental clutter: the frozen track is
conceptually one linear stream of audio and you can stop worrying
about the dozens or hundreds of regions that actually comprise it.

> 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 agree, but I can see why people would disagree.
 
> 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.

Sounds good to me. 

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.openplans.org/people/slinkp/profile
yahoo: slinkp23
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