I thought about track freezing a bit, that is, automatically freezing tracks: you toggle a track from unfrozen to “auto-freeze”, and everytime you edited it (after a few seconds of not editing it, changing to another track, etc.), renoise renders and freezes it, in the background and with a progress indicator at the top of the track.
(as long as the track freezing hasn’t finished, playback uses the unfrozen data)
in some cases this would be just perfect, say, a long vocal sample track with little fx on it: you nudge/cut the vocal a bit, freezing takes just a few seconds, and you can listen in to it anywhere in the song. ahhh, that would be such bliss!
with tracks that take longer to freeze, you would want to manually freeze them when you’re done with your edits. so I guess there should be three settings for that toggle: unfrozen, “auto-freeze” and “freeze”. maybe with options for quality settings, too (when you want them to differ from the defaults which are set in the preferences, where you can also set the priority for the thread that freezes tracks), so you can go all out for maximum quality on the few tracks where you need that. although 99% of the time you’d just want to set the default to what you’re rendering the song as anyway, I guess.
a neat little thing would be Renoise converting frozen tracks automatically to mono if the left and right channel are exactly identical.
to me the most tricky part - besides memory consumption, streaming from HD would probably have to come first - is that to be really render a track, Renoise would have to render the whole song from the beginning, taking ALL tracks into account that are connected to the track you’re freezing. e.g. another track might have a signal follower that influences it… would that be feasible? to pick out the tracks you need to take into account? or would it be safer to always take all tracks into account? if the later was the case, I still would want it.
hmm, I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say here, just throwing out ideas. I just like to talk about track freezing haha! (not in an impatient way though, more in a “playing with your christmas toys in your head, in autumn” kind of way)