In this edition of Minute GarageBand, we’re going to show you how to lock tracks in versions of GarageBand prior to version six the track header contained five buttons, version six sought to simplify the interface by hiding two of these buttons by default one of which was the track lock button.
In order to lock a track simply use the track menu and select the show track lock menu item now you can click the lock icon in any track and the next time you play the project all locked racks will be rendered to before playback begins, Now the have a question is what purpose is served by locking a track.
To understand that we need to understand how an unlocked track functions for a software track your Mac has to generate the instrument play the notes and then apply any effects you’ve added as the track is being played back in other words in “real-time” this can require a lot of computing power and may limit the number of tracks and or effects that you can use, for a real instrument track while the instrument doesn’t need to be generated all the effects need to be rendered in real-time when you lock a track all the work of generating an instrumental or rendering an effect is performed ahead of time and saved to disc as a high resolution thirty two-bit file called a Freeze-File this means that when you playback the project all the computer has to do is read the file from disc so there’s minimal processing being done.
Additionally, once a track is locked you can’t accidentally move or delete any regions within the track should you find the need to make additional edits, however, you can unlock the track, edit your original recordings, and re-lock it to render out a high-resolution Freeze-File.
