Freeze Track(s) (render To Sample Tng)

(sure someone must have mentioned this one before, especially as [i think] Ableton Live does it)

When I’m stacking up the VST effects Renoise across multiple tracks its easy to max out the CPU and arrive at a particular pattern that overloads or canes too much.

I know we’ve got Render To Sample as something of a workaround, what I’m talking about here is a variation on that.

At present if you decide to bounce a bunch of tracks with render to sample, then you decide you want to make changes later, you obviously have to re-render the section you’ve ‘bounced’ to the sample and keep doing this every time you change your mind about the rendered bit.

If the process could be automated this would be a real godsend. I’m thinking something like, you markout tracks(s) to be frozen, which retain their notes and data, but just become shaded (blue and white ideally ;) these tracks then render to samples (but the renders are kept behind the scenes and not listed as instruments to avoid confusion and clutter in the instrument list. Whenever frozen sections play, the sample counterparts play instead freeing CPU at the cost of memory.

The frozen samples are not saved with the tune, just rendered again at load time to allow the function to work properly.

If you then decide to edit a frozen section, the frozen section immediately loses the shading and reverts to its regular track state. The rendered frozen buffer is invalidated and scrapped. After your edit, you can refreeze the section, this rerenders and again frees the CPU.

Basically its an automated layer on top of the render to sample feature that removes the need to micro manage your renders by automatically handling them in an intuitive way.

The only problems I can foresee with implementing frozen track(s) would be the fact that a frozen section would not include tail-end reverbs or sustained notes from previous patterns unless the freezing was done by playing through the whole song and doing the render that way. It still wouldn’t be able to cater for complex songs that reuse the same pattern with different lingering notes/effects from different preceding patterns.

That said, it would still be incredibly useful for many tunes even though there are a few exceptions as mentioned. It would allow for some super heavy effects / high CPU vst tunes!

let me know what you guys think

IMHO the only way to to it cleanly and without headaches is to render the tracks from song start to song end?

And hey, saving the freezed data along with the song would be kewl actually, as long as there was a way to remove it before saving (to share songs etc.)…

As much as I’m craving a feature like either of those options, I’m worried that it would seriously up the system requirements for Renoise. If I load up 8 tracks of song length audio (wav format, about 3 min long each) to do “post mixing” like I want to since I love the mixer/effect layout and automation, Renoise coughs up a lung and stutters to a halt. That’s without any effects or automation at all, just the samples/tracks.

So I use Reaper for that phase and it has no problems since that’s what it was designed for. Obviously, Renoise was not.

I also have a old PC: 1.8ghz, XP sp3, usb audio

I appreciate that man, I have Renoise on a netbook too and it obviously jokes with anything too heavy.

I suppose I am suggesting the feature for high-end rigs rather than machines that will choke. There are certain Renoise things you just can’t do on a low spec machine right now and this would just be another.

While slower rigs would miss out on track freezing it would be so helpful for super busy songs on faster desktops.

Yeah, its mentioned before - I still like the idea a lot. Your explanation is nice and clean btw.

I guess this has to be an option per track, to keep people with high CPU and low-mem happy.

Perhaps its an idea that you can specify the amount of rows you want to capture after the last note to include reverb tails etc…

One thing that can have some impact, I guess, is keeping track of the exact position of the frozen wave-render. But when this is solved, the problem with tracking long samples (like vocals) is solved too! To flies in one hit!

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The solution to this would be probably disk streaming. Also for freezed tracks we’d probably need some sort of audio tracks first.

it was sugested millions times and nothing
and long sample problems too

pianoroll will apear faster than this feature
but this feature is critical, come on

What Beatslaughter said. We need audio tracks first. Right now implementing this wouldn’t make much sense.