Track freeze
A DAW feature that temporarily renders a track and its plugins to audio to free up the CPU.
A virtual synth feeding three reverbs can eat an entire core. Freeze the track and the DAW plays back a pre-rendered audio file instead, switching the plugins off while keeping every setting. Need a change? Unfreeze, tweak, freeze again. Unlike a plain export, the original stays intact behind the frozen version.
The feature became standard in the early 2000s, when soft synths began outgrowing what home computers could run. It cures xruns and takes load off delay compensation while recording. The price is that frozen tracks cannot be tweaked in real time — and that anyone who forgot what is frozen will sooner or later turn a knob and hear nothing change.