(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