Track freeze is coming to Pro Tools sometime this year (not withstanding the huge legal disclaimer in the Avid technology demo video), but in the meantime we’ve discovered a cool way to get instant track freeze using the new free Waves Studio Rack plug-in.

It’s simple to do, but you need to be using Waves plug-ins on your track. 

Use the new Waves Studiorack plug-in and add the plug-ins you want on any audio track. Get all your EQ, compression, gates and effects all set-up and then when you are happy save that as a preset.

Then grab the audio on the track and open the AudioSuite version of the Waves StudioRack. Open the preset you saved and then render the preset to the track. Instant track freeze.

If you want to get back to the original audio then it will be in your clip list and you can simply pull it back into the track.

A couple of things to note: 

1. Until Waves offer third party support for Studiorack plug-ins then it only works with Waves plug-ins.

2. It does not work on instument tracks, you would need to render them first as audio tracks, which kind defeats the point.

However if you use Waves plug-ins most of the time, then this is a cool little trick for hi-speed track freezing. It’s a lot quicker than the current offline bounce in Pro Tools and all the faffing around it takes to bounce offline audio stems, especially for those without HD rigs.