freezing tracks Kontakt

[Rubens]

Hi all,

I am getting that message "you do not have enough available busses to freeze these tracks. go to configure audio system to reconfigure busses" when trying to freeze kontakt 5 MIDI tracks. I don't know what that means... Anyone know what I should do?

Of course I already tried to change to several different busses options without any success. From 64 to 2048.

[FMiguelez]

DP now has practically unlimited bussing capabilities.

What I suppose that message is telling you is that you need to increase the number of the default buses.
You do that in Setup>Configure Audio System>Configure Studio Settings.
Simply increase whatever number of buses you have right there.
You probably need to restart DP and even the computer for this to take in.

We used to be very limited in this department. This was a very recent addition to DP (DP9.52?) and I LOVE it!

[Rubens]

FMiguelez , do you have any suggestion of a number of busses that I should use?
It already worked, I've changed from 16 to 32. Should I have even more?
Thank you!!!

[FMiguelez]

It depends on how complex your signal routing usually is.

Before, the busing was a struggle for me with the limit of 100 stereo buses we used to have. Now, since I pre-route all my VIs, and I mix via stems exclusively, that requires LOTS of buses! I think I'm using at least 250 ATM.

My suggestion would be to set up the number of buses around 25% more than you typically use. This way you always have free temporary buses for freezing or any sudden mixing routing you may need at any given time.

IF setting the bus parameter for as many as are allowed do NOT interfere with DP or cause more CPU usage, then I would set it at its highest and forget about it (but this is something probably only a MOTU software engineer could tell us for sure). My guess is DP will only "use" them ONCE you assign them to an active track.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Might be nice to know what version of DP you're using. Maybe even some hardware and OS info might be of interest in understanding your issue(s).

[Rubens]

Great thank you!
I am using the latest DP9 with Motu 624 interface.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Great thank you!
I am using the latest DP9 with Motu 624 interface.

[Rubens]

Hi FMiguelez,

thank you for the answer.

Could you explain what is the process of mixing via stems?
Anything to do with creating busses to every track or group of tracks?

[FMiguelez]

Hi FMiguelez,

thank you for the answer.

Could you explain what is the process of mixing via stems?
Anything to do with creating busses to every track or group of tracks?

Hi, Rubens.

Sure!
Stems are groups of related tracks that you bus together for mixing into subgroups, e.g, the strings stem, the latin percussion stem, the guitars stem, the vocals stem, the bass instruments stem, etc.
Think of them as sub-mixes of instruments that you bus together for ease of editing/mixing and for ease of coming up with alternative mixes. With stems, it's a piece of cake to shorten or extend your pieces as required, and it's also easy to take out elements as needed (maybe the post house needs to mute the brass in the middle of the piece for some reason).
Then, you route all your stems normally to a final bus where everything sums, i.e., your master bus.

For this to work, you need to do lots of busing and routing, since you must duplicate any effects for every stem you will use (reverbs, delays, etc.), so you can easily capture each stem with its dedicated effects.

Usually, the point of doing this is that your final mix is IDENTICAL to the sum of your stems (this is very important for post-houses).
Working with stems, and depending on your producing style, do have a few "inconveniences" or shortcomings, especially for people who like having plugins in their master fader... For instance, there are those who like "mixing into a master compressor" or some sort of chain for certain styles. But that sort of defeats the purpose of stems because any effects you place in the master track will NOT be part of the sound thereof (because they come before the master bus in the chain, and any EQ or compression interactions of the FULL MIX will be different than if you hit them with lone/separate stems). This may or may not be an issue, but you should be aware of this.

So the workflow I like is>
- I almost never put anything on the master bus... my mixes must sound finished and polished without recurring to master bus effects
- Any "mastering chains" or general effects (like pumping tracks with a kick) that should affect ALL the instruments, must be done at the stem (instrument submix) level. If needed, this means lots of redundant duplication of effects and CPU usage.
- Do the final mastering at the very end, in such a way that it doesn't change the sound of the mix too much. For this, it's a good idea to insert the required effects in the master temporarily during production, just to check that any possible heavy compression/limiting in the mastering (in the case of EDM styles) won't make your mix collapse into disaster. So, for styles where loudness is important, it's good to try to achieve it early in the mix, starting at the track-level and ending at the stem -level.

So basically, it's like mixing normally, but with a very useful added layer of control before the master.

I have been mixing like this for a few years now, and it works beautifully well for orchestral stuff. For other styles, for the mentioned reasons, it may not work too well for some, but to "force" it, you just need to treat each stem as if it were a "mini-master" and get the sound you want from the master chain embedded into individual stems.

Having bounced or recorded stems also is a great way of future-proofing your projects . I know that, if 10 years from now, Waves plugins exist no more, or if MOTU went out of business, at least I still have my 7 or 8 wet audio stems that summed are identical to the final mix. I could then replace stems, add or subtract from them, extend/shorten the piece, etc.

Hope that helps!

[Rubens]

Hi FMiguelez, yes, it helps despite my limited capacity to fully understand how and mostly why to do that.
If I understood well, after freezing the tracks, let's say woodwinds, you'll take each track with all inserts, including reverb, and send it's output to a buss group and then mix through the sub mix only. Of course before you must mix as well individual volumes and pan and then after they are balanced in the group you can avoid touching them individually. Until here am I right?
Why not create the woodwinds group but as a send having the reverb also there? Wouldn't have you more control as you could change sending amounts?
Maybe I am not understanding basic stuff here sorry!

[FMiguelez]

Hi FMiguelez, yes, it helps despite my limited capacity to fully understand how and mostly why to do that.
If I understood well, after freezing the tracks, let's say woodwinds, you'll take each track with all inserts, including reverb, and send it's output to a buss group and then mix through the sub mix only. Of course before you must mix as well individual volumes and pan and then after they are balanced in the group you can avoid touching them individually. Until here am I right?

Hmmmm. No, not really
I never said anything about freezing. All of what I wrote is in real time with regular audio tracks. The effects, such as reverb, delay, etc., are used via sends from these tracks. These effect signals go to their respective aux tracks, and then I join the wet tracks and dry tracks in another aux track.

So it goes like the following for each used stem.
The tracks from the string family get this treatment (both in parallel):
String tracks ---> Normal dry signal bused to Strings DRY stem aux via their output. Then, this signal goes via its track output to the Strings WET stem aux.
... and String tracks ----> Normal dry signal bused to aux tracks with FXs via parallel sends. Then, this signal goes to the Strings WET stem aux via its normal output.

So both signals, wet and dry, get summed together in the WET STEM aux track. From there, the signal can go to the master fader, or yet one more level of control (where I have a few more layers of aux tracks to control other things, like music, dialog, vocals, etc.

Why not create the woodwinds group but as a send having the reverb also there? Wouldn't have you more control as you could change sending amounts?
Maybe I am not understanding basic stuff here sorry!

Like I wrote you have more control because you get the individual tracks + the dry aux + the FXs aux + the wet stem.

You can decide if, for instance, you send reverb from each individual instrument (more control) or if you send them all as a group from the Dry stem (a little less control).

If I have time in the evening, I'll post a pic of my mixer illustrating this for you. This is where a pic tells more than a thousand words.

[Rubens]

I meant the freezing because in my case, working with Vi's, I will need to freeze first in order to have the audio tracks.
Yes, the pic would be fantastic! Thank you so much FMiguelez!!!

[FMiguelez]

I meant the freezing because in my case, working with Vi's, I will need to freeze first in order to have the audio tracks.

Maybe I'm not understanding something, but why would you need to freeze them to have audio tracks?
You can have audio tracks monitoring the MIDI VIs live, and that is much more flexible: you can print them late into the production, when they're as polished as possible, since you can mix/tweak MIDI and "un-printed" audio as you go.

You can monitor your VIs via aux tracks or via audio tracks with input-monitoring enabled (the latter being my preferred method, since printing to audio is literally a click away). And you can also go back and forth between MIDI and audio (printed or unprinted/live) and your mix will never change. This is awesome for going back and tweaking MIDI performances when you're advanced into the mixing stage of the project.

If you want to know more details about that, which I think it's a really effective workflow -and DP excels at it-, I can dig up a thread where I wrote extensively about it a years ago. Let me know if you're interested, so I look for it.

[Rubens]

Hi FMiguelez,

yes please, I am very interested. For now, the terms like printed or unprinted/live, are Chinese for me.
I was freezing believing that the Vi's took too much resource... Also to work with only audio tracks...
But it seems now that this is not the best method...