questions about freezing tracks

[Mark Swanson]

I can't seem to find much info on freezing tracks, I can't locate it in Bill's manual, or find any videos about it, even though I seem to remember having seen one.
I can see it's a easy process, but when I freeze a Submix track containing four audio tracks, the volume of the frozen Submix track is different from the mix I had before I froze it. Is that normal?

[Mark Swanson]

I see some have read my post, but no help yet, I probably am not explaining my situation well enough. But I do know I would really like to solve my issue... maybe I can post a video that will show what is happening. I will work on that tonight. Thanks in advance!

[spoontechnique]

There's two types of track freezing, one is freezing the whole track, the other way is to use a freeze points. Freeze points allow you to freeze a track before or after certain plugins. You might want to try a freeze point before the submix's volume plugin.

That said, Submix routing is a bit finicky in some edge cases. It might work better to freeze individual tracks and leave the submix unfrozen.

[Mark Swanson]

Thank you... after re-booting my machine and trying out your suggestions, it looks like things are working right! I did not try the freeze point, I might need a little explaining on that one.

[bermudagold]

Does freezing, muting a track, or deactivating/bypassing a plugin release plugins from RAM, or only turns off their CPU usage?

[Watchful]

I don't know!

Freezing a track certainly and visibly frees up CPU usage; not sure if it truly releases them from RAM, as unfreezing quickly returns them to a normal state.

I was about to say that muting sure does NOT have an effect on RAM, because often when I unmute a track I get a brief "blast" of sound, as if it was quietly processing in the background.

But then I just muted a track (a project with a single track to be sure), and indeed the CPU use ticked downward as if I had just frozen the track.

Most curious. And a great question!