freezing and bouncing tracks, do what?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nathan1984
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Nathan1984

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I have been doing some reading here lately, I came across some terms that I am not familiar with that may be useful in not hogging my cpu juice. I seen something about freezing tracks, like soft synth, and bouncing tracks, and clips, what do these terms mean and how are they used?
 
"Freezing" (on my DAW) means you take a track with all the FX/processing plugs...and you freeze (aka re-sample to a new file) the track WITH the plugs. That then releases the processing power, since the FX/Processing is now part of the file.

"Bouncing" is somewhat similar, in that you take a track or tracks and "bounce" (combine) everything to a new, single track...which will also save CPU power.

Of course...you can't change those tracks once they are forzen/bounced...though most DAW should allow you to go back to the unfrozen/bounced, or have them saved outside of the active project, that way you are not totally painted into a corner.
 
Freezing tracks essentially renders an export of the track with the plugins running, that replaces the event for playback. This frees up CPU power in a non destructive way. If you want to edit the track however, you must unfreeze it.

Bouncing frees up CPU by rendering an export of the audio part not including plugins. All crossfades and editing is bounced into one continuous audio file. This cannot be undone after project has been saved, so make sure the track does not have any bad edits (pops/clicks from punch in's) as they will be harder to remove after track is bounced.
 
Ok, that was what I was gathering, let me summarize this up then to be sure, bouncing takes a few tracks, and makes them one, but doesn't apply the effects when they are bounced. Freezing, basically makes a wav file and blends the tracks and effects together in that wav file?
 
jimmys69 said:
Bouncing frees up CPU by rendering an export of the audio part not including plugins. All crossfades and editing is bounced into one continuous audio file. This cannot be undone after project has been saved, so make sure the track does not have any bad edits (pops/clicks from punch in's) as they will be harder to remove after track is bounced.
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You should be able to undo a bounce. (should be an option when bouncing.) At least in Cubase you can, I think all DAW's have this functionality.
 
NL5 said:
You should be able to undo a bounce. (should be an option when bouncing.) At least in Cubase you can, I think all DAW's have this functionality.
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Yes, you can undo a bounce in Cubase (just about anything actually), but not after you save the project.

In Cubase anyway, bounce only applies to events on one single track. Not multiples.
 
jimmys69 said:
Yes, you can undo a bounce in Cubase (just about anything actually), but not after you save the project.
Click to expand...

Sure you can. I don't remember off the top of my head, but when you bounce, it gives you the option to keep the old tracks, and even if you don't keep them, they should still be in the audio pool (unless you dump that, but with computers these days I NEVER do that. Haven't needed to in ages.
 
I suppose I should have been more clear. You cannot 'undo' the bounce after a save. You can always pull up the original file out of the pool, but you will lose all of the previous edits and have to start over. I have not had to do this in a long time either. Just wanted to advise the OP to make sure and check the edits before bouncing to avoid having to re-edit.
 
ok, so I get the freeze, I used it on ezdrummer, man, what a difference it made when it came to mixing, didn't kill the cpu anymore. But, I tried bouncing two guitar tracks, I selected my two tracks, and bounced to track, it more or less just copied my tracks to two new tracks. Did it just copy my tracks with my applied eq, or what? I thought it was suppose to make them into one track, minus eq.
 
What DAW are you using anyway?. I am really only familiar with Cubase. As far as I know, in the digital realm, bounce has a different meaning than with tape. I used to bounce tracks to open up channels on a 4 track Portastudio. There is really no need to do this in a DAW. Audio itself does not eat up so much CPU at all. The effects, edit, time stretch on the track however does.

In Cubase a bounce just combines the audio parts from one channel into a continuous event. No eq or effects applied.
 
I use sonar 8 pe, yeah, I mean I don't really think I need to bounce my tracks. I could always do my some effects in my busses, and after figuring out the freeze function, EZdrummer isn't sucking all my cpu juice.
 
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