Pre-rendering like DP + Reaper

[jimmivalentino]

Not sure if some form of track freezing is going to be included in FL 20 but I don't want that anymore anyway.

Never used Reaper before the other day but wow PRE-RENDERING IS THE FUTURE. I don't even have to think about whether I want to freeze something or not, I don't have to wait around for a track to freeze like I do in Logic, and I don't have to unfreeze it to work on it again - the whole process of which wastes time.

Maybe the system could work in a way that FL comes with a new system folder included, where it pre-renders tracks for the current project like it makes backups - and the pre-render folder would retain say 50 pre-rendered tracks at a time (or more if the project includes more). This would mean that FL Studio users that have lower-spec CPUs and thus usually lower track counts in their projects could retain a number of tracks pre-rendered at any one time, but also because the renders are not saved to a Project folder as such, the FLPs would still be easily transportable like they are now, and just rely on whichever CPU is hosting the project to re-pre-render the tracks if they're not found in the user's FL Studio Pre-Rendered folder.

Perhaps the best thing about a pre-rendering system, is that the user doesn't need to make any choices about freezing with FL's quite unique channel rack -> mixer routing process. The FL engine could just work out what track is going where at any point in time, and pre-render it, without the user ever knowing or needing to know the actual routed path of the plugins -> inserts -> sends etc, and would remove the decision of the user having to decide whether it would be best to render the generator itself in place, or do it on the mixer level, or do it from a send, or whatever. It would also effectively solve the issue for an FL dev trying to decide whether to make track freeze something which is implemented in the Channel Rack on instruments only, or the Mixer, with routings locked and preserved. Being that the new FL PDC in FL 20 is supposed to compensate right down to the Channel Rack level, it seems that FL is already making a lot of complex routing calculations at this level, so I imagine it might be easier to implement now than ever before.

Anyway, don't expect this idea to get a lot of traction, but just putting it out there. While it can of course be argued why would anyone want to make a pre-rendering system when CPUs get exponentially faster year-on-year, I think that it is still a worthwhile idea to consider. The CPU usage thing with current CPU speeds I think must be somewhat like the phenomenon of the more roads a city builds, the more people use them. I know I personally own a LOT more analogue-modelled and heavily-oversampled digital plugins than I did 5 years ago, as I'm sure most people do, and because of that, I don't feel like my computer is significantly faster than when I first started using FL Studio with it ~10 years ago now. The plug-ins we use are always going to get more processor-intensive and the productions we make are always going to have to get more intricate to compete in the current + future music market, and something like pre-rendering would allow us to work on almost anything almost anywhere without worrying about massive CPU draw, or mixer level rendering (which gets very very messy) as much.

[Trivorak]

I've used reaper for time and don't know what y...