From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

CPU management and Track Freeze - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Ableton Live 10 Essential Training

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CPU management and Track Freeze

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- [Instructor] As a project progresses, the number of tracks and devices being used can reach a point where they choke the program. Ableton offers a useful solution to this problem. So let's talk about track freeze and how it helps relieve CPU overload. So I've got exercise one from chapter seven open, and I'll just mention at the start here that the track freeze works in both arrangement view and in session view, and in fact, if we freeze a track in arrangement view, it will simultaneously freeze the track and any clips in session view. Okay, so I'm going to work on this plucked synth track, and let's just select that first clip and I'll hit the solo button and I'll hit play so we can just hear what's on there. (steady synthesizer music) Okay, so when you freeze a track, Live will create a temporary audio file for each track or clip in session view. Now, when it freezes that, it's going to include any underlying automation, and any effects that you have on the track including your virtual instrument if you're on a MIDI track, and I should mention that this track freeze works on both audio tracks and on MIDI tracks. So, with that selected, let's go ahead and I'll choose the nameplate on the pluck synth track, and then I'm going to right click and from the contextual menu, I'm going to choose Freeze Track. Okay, now that the track is frozen, we can see the results here and we see this striped diagonal coloring on the clips on the track, and if I click on one of those, and we look down here in the clip overview, you'll notice that it's all got kind of a blue color to it, and if we look at the parameters over here in the notes in clip box, they're also unavailable and have that same kind of blue film color across the top. If I hit shift tab so that we can see the devices that are on that track, we can see that they're also unavailable and they have that same kind of blue coating across the top. Now let's just check out what the track sounds like, so I'll choose that same clip. (steady synthesizer music) So we can hear that we're getting the same sound from the frozen track that we did from the original track. Now, if I tab over to session view, and I looked at the plucked synth track and I click one of the clips, again down here in device view, we see that same blue film effect over the top of the devices and if I shift tab, we can see that that clip is in the same state, so freezing it in arrangement view also froze it in session view. I'm going to flip back over to... Arrangement view by pressing the tab key, and at this point, if I want to make any changes on this track, you should first realize that frozen tracks will not respond to changes in tempo or transposition or any warping or anything of that nature. So, if I need to go back in and adjust something, I'll actually need to unfreeze the track, and we can do that by right clicking on the track nameplate again, and choosing Unfreeze Track from the contextual menu. It immediately lets us back into the clip, and at this point, I can make changes either to the MIDI data on the track in this example or to devices that are playing that MIDI data, but at some point, you may actually want to render this track as audio, and one of the quickest ways to do that is through this freeze option. So if I go back to the nameplate and I refreeze this track and because, by the way, I hadn't changed anything, it did that very rapidly. So now I'll right click on the track nameplate and I'll point out that we have another option in the contextual menu that says Flatten, and so if we choose Flatten, it's going to replace the temp audio file that we have here with a bounced audio file, and it will convert any MIDI tracks into audio tracks and it's going to render any of the MIDI, any warped audio and any effects to this new bounced audio file. Now before we do that, I just want to point out there is no undo for this option. So you want to make sure that you're ready to do this before you use this option or you may want to duplicate the track first and then do it. And if you're happy, then you can go back and you can delete any unnecessary tracks. So I'll click the Flatten option, and it takes just a second and now when we look at the clips on that track, we can see that it says freeze, in the name of every one of those clips. Also, if we look down here in device view, we can see that there's an audio file in the clip overview, and if I press shift, tab, we can see that there are no devices here anymore. So now that you know how to freeze and flatten tracks in Live, you'll be better able to manage those times when your Live sets get large enough to cause CPU problems.

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