Are all Vst plugins imprinted into a track or a stem while freezing or exporting the tracks? If no, does it depend on the DAW or a plugin itself? I am on Ableton Live 11.

 

In a straight forward setup (track, insert FX, nothing else), yes.
Things start to get complicated when you have external sidechain triggers, or want to print separate tracks while selecting the subgroup/folder, (however it's called in your DAW). Then it depends on the DAW.

 

I have read here in the forum that a specific plugin doesn't print in. I don't remember which one. Another thing can be complicated while exporting bus tracks or ghost tracks for sidechains.

 

I never seen a single plugin that doesn't print offline and online ... WHY it would be like this ?
Apart an headphone sim or something like that, i don"t see the point.

Back to tracks : every DAW on earth give you the option to disable tracks on export.
And even if it don"t at export, you can do it before exporting.

Read :
https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/360000843404-Importing-and-exporting-stems

 

You can use a Midi file for Sidechain. It gives powerful options and does not get much easier, imo. https://modeaudio.com/magazine/using-midi-files-sidechain-compression-filtering

Your "specific plugin" could be cracked incompletely. Screwing with export functions is not unheard of. Most demo software do that sort of stuff.

 

Last edited: Jul 9, 2023