Cubase has freeze also but it's a little different than audio export - maybe its the same way in Ableton? Freeze comes in handy more when I have a plugins running in the DAW that are CPU heavy (instruments or fx). The advantage is that if I have something like Dune2 playing a thick strings pad with a lot of notes and fx, that single instrument might take up 15-20% or more of CPU by itself. Freeze gives me a way to bring the CPU down to almost 0% usage with one click (actually a single button press the CH Cubase channel controller since it has its own button). It is essentially just creating invisible audio clip of the track behind the scenes, locking the midi data so it can't be edited, and managing it all invisibly, then giving an easy way to unfreeze individual tracks as needed for editing. It's one of the reasons I prefer soft synths from a workflow perspective, treating of midi data and audio as one, whereas I have to treat them as separate entities with my hardware. Freezing of course doesn't work with external instruments which would need to be recorded in real-time anyway. What I wasn't sure about originally is if the TI had the ability to take midi and render it digitally internally to feed back to the DAW - it makes sense to me that it would not, because while the technology is there to do it (the Virus is could be thought of as just a soft synth running on dedicated hardware), it would complicate the TI aspect and it seems they already have their hands full with that.
But I have to say I don't understand why if the OP is talking of simple note stealing from too much DSP demand, why he is getting such different results with simple playback. It should manifest there too unless there is something creating additional DSP demand during export.
|