What is this process called FREEZING in GarageBand10.0.2

The Freeze Mode gets activated when you enable "Track Lock" on a Track. The Track Lock Button is hidden by default and can be made visible with the Main Menu Track ➤ Track Header ➤ Show/Hide Track Lock.

When enabled and you hit play, the following thing happens

• GarageBand bounces that Track to an audio file and saves it to your GarageBand Project Files as an aiff file.
• From now on, the Track will be played back from that audio file.
• All the Effects Plugins are now disable because they were included in the bounce which saves CPU power (useful on bigger Projects).
• You can change anything on that Track until you disable the Track Logic button
• Once disabled, the Freeze file in your GarageBand Project will be discarded.

I explain all those little details in my comprehensive book "GarageBand X - How it Works", also how to open the GarageBand Project Files. There you can have access to those Freeze files. You can use this as a "Track Bounce in Place" feature if you want to send Tracks to your ProTools guy for further mixing of your Project.

Hope that helps

Edgar Rothermich

http://DingDingMusic.com/Manuals/

'I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.'

So for those who come looking for answers I wanted to share my experience with the current version Mac OS 10.12.6 and GarageBand 10.2. I do remember that freezing tracks used to work on previous versions of Garage Band(you would see a progress bar exporting the track to an audio file and giving a dialog saying to press Command . to cancel it. In 10.2 though while you can still enable the lock button this doesn't do anything on Garage Band 10.2. I have the problem described here:

GarageBand: Error while trying to synchronize Audio and MIDI.

Looking at the documentation for Logic I found this SHOULD alleviate the problem:

Logic Pro X: Freeze tracks

If you see an audio and MIDI sync alert in Logic Pro X - Apple Support

The reason becomes very obvious when you read @Edgar's reply but the problem is it does not work anymore. The system still behaves the same way:

"locked"

"unlocked"

I have a project with 32 tracks (28 of which are AMP emulator based for guitar) and a Saffire PRO 26 Focusrite running through a Firewire/Thunderbolt adapter. I noticed the EXACT same clipping/glitching when I use something as simple as a Rocksmith Cable(the Ubisoft game) which is nothing but a version of this:

Amazon.com: Hosa USQ-110 1/4 inch TS to USB Type A TRACKLINK USB Interface Cable, 10 feet: Musical Instruments

On both cases the problem starts around the 22 or 24 track number.

Ultimately, it doesn't look like "locking" actually frees up resources anymore, because well, all is doing now is disabling the tracks from being written into rather than exporting them as it used to.

The air file in your Trash look like regular Audio Files you've recorded on an Audio Track in GarageBand and then deleted.

When you delete any Audio Region, its referring Audio File gets moved to the Trash. You could pick it out of the Trash and drag it over to a Finder window if you want to save it.

There is a strange behavior (maybe a bug). When you undo a Audio Region deletion , then you can see that the audio files are moved back from the Trash bingo the GarageBand Project file. However, they are not placed back as Audio Regions onto the Audio Track. Next time you save your Project, GarageBand will delete those audio files from your Project File for good (because GarageBand think that these are orphan files. This time, they are gone for good (not in the Trash).

As you can see in my previous screenshot, the air file that are created by the Freeze mode follow a special naming convention and in addition when you un-freeze a Track, they will deleted (without going to the Trash).