This walkthrough covers the full Freezer section of Ableton's Spectral Time, from basic operation through to the controls that shape how each freeze sounds and behaves. Clicking the Freeze button captures a slice of incoming audio and sustains it indefinitely, with the spectrogram giving a real-time visual readout of the frozen frequencies.
Re-trigger mode automates the process by detecting transients and re-freezing on each new onset. The Sensitivity knob controls how readily Spectral Time responds to those transients, and a yellow LED blinks each time a re-freeze fires. Beyond Onsets, Sync mode locks re-triggers to a fixed millisecond interval, and Notes mode ties them to MIDI input.
To smooth transitions between freezes, X-fade crossfades each handoff automatically. Envelope mode gives more granular control, letting you set the fade-in and fade-out of each freeze independently.
Resolution is a tradeoff: lower settings introduce a gritty, artifact-heavy digital character, while higher settings sound cleaner but add latency. Hovering over the device title shows the current latency in the status bar, which is worth monitoring if Spectral Time sits in a timing-sensitive chain.