Today I made a very important discovery.

Logic, my DAW, does not consider sidechain signals when freezing. This is a very fatal bug IMO, and it has affected my work and the resulting mixes profoundly.

(Freezing, for you noobs, is the process of rendering down demanding audio tracks to save CPU juice during realtime work. If you have a monster plugin or huge channel strip single-handedly using 95* of the computer's resources, Logic can render the track to disk and disable the plugins, freeing up CPU.)

What I discovered today, to my surprise, and relief:

When, freezing Logic does not consider the sidechain signal unless this signal is also frozen. This has devastating effects on mixes. If you control the dynamics of the bass by the drums, and you freeze the bass track alone, the frozen signal does not incorporate the dynamics from the drums. So the REALTIME version sound awesome. The FROZEN version sounds crap.

In some simple situations this would be very appearant but in more complex arrangements, like mine, you would not really notice a single freeze being wrong. But 5 or 10 would perhaps collapse the sound, and drive you crazy because you couldn't figure what went wrong. You cannot run the project in realtime to check how it is supposed to sound, you HAVE to freeze stuff to run it at all at once. Catch 22.

I find this bug very lackluster programming and very bad planning from the fat lazy sauerkraut chewing americanized Germans behind Logic. It should be as simple as;

IF Freeeze CONTAINS Sidechain:

    FOR EACH Source FEEDING Sidechain:

        INCLUDE Source IN Freeze

The Germans are really getting sloppy lately.

Anyway I'm just glad I discovered this now, in time. It probably explains why I've been having so much trouble with complex mixes. I know how to work around it.