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Freeze function has been used in pro studios for years. Even with bigass DSP power it's sometimes handy to free some DSP power (in most pro studio's "software" effects aren't processed by the cpu, but by DSP's). For movies for example, where it's not rare to see projects of 100 tracks and more. Even if you only put effects on half of them, you'll quickly bring the system on its knees.
This has been more true now more than ever, with the coming of host based effects and instruments. Even if you have a mighty powerful system, on a decent project it's easy to go in the red (try to use the Vienna Symphonic Library and you'll see what I mean). Before you had to do a long process of bouncing. If you had to change something, you had to revert back to when it wasn't bounced yet. Freezing is basically a temporary bounce. Suppose you have a softsynth, with a big reverb algorythm over it, plus a compressor, all software. It would already use a lot of cpu power. With a freeze function, it temporarilly bounces that track to audio (and disables the midi/softsynth/effect). Audio doesn't rely on cpu much (more on harddisk speed). If you need to change anything on that part, you unfreeze it and you get your "old" track back so you can quickly make adjustments. No need to revert to an old save, adjust and bounce again.
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