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So lately I've been using a shittonne of WAVES plug-ins and clocking my CPU ridiculously high

I don't tend to export midi to audio because I'm constantly changing things. I so how much better is exporting audio when compared to simply freezing the track?

Its really the same exact thing, Ableton bounces the audio and keeps it in a temp folder instead of you handling the audio file yourself.

Only difference would be things like side chain compression preventing you from freezing the track.

Freeze / Flatten has changed my life. Freezing will make Ableton print the track with all FX so that it plays an audio clip instead of using CPU power to run all of the plugins. It is nice because you don't lose the ability to undo it so you can unfreeze and tweak the plugins if you want. I always use this feature. Once I get up to 40+ tracks, I need to freeze stuff so it doesn't stutter.

In order to get around the sidechaining thing, I always have my midi tracks in a group and sidechain the group. That way you can freeze an individual midi track but still keep your group (or bus) sidechaining.

If you are into resampling, you can go one step further and flatten a frozen track. It is an amazing time saver that I recently found out about. When you freeze a track, Ableton kind of hides the audio clip in it's files so when you flatten a frozen track, it completely changes the midid track to an audio track and prints the audio clip so you can further process it. The only down side to this is that it replaces the midi track with a new audio track and you lose all of your FX. You can undo it but eventually you can't go back. It is good for resampling though.