FX Freeze is a nice little plugin that can improve the number of your mulitimbral instruments drastically.
What it can do goes far beyond the freeze-function in Cubase 5 (which I use). The Virus doesn't allow you to freeze a VST-track. If you try to do it you will get a pop up message from Virus that tells you it's a no go!
The only way to do it in Cubase is either: 1. To bounce the miditrack to an audio-track while muting the rest of the tracks. 2. To connect the balanced outputs to the soundcard inputs and record an audio track while playing the Virus-plugin midi/instrument track. Then you have to mute the midi-track and you end up with two tracks that is taking up space and looking horrible. Editing is also a pain.
If you instead use the FX-Freeze wrapper you can do it much faster and elegant without even getting an extra audiotrack just like normal freeze in Cubase.
What the plugin does: The plugin splits every added instrument in Virus to a new MIDI channel so you actually will see one instrument on channel 1, 2 etc. in Cubase and not just one channel. If you have an instrument that is very complex you can then choose to freeze this instrument only instead of freezing every instrument like you normally do in Cubase (which Virus wont even let you do anyway). So when one instrument is frozen you can still play the other one(s) without any problems.
A very brilliant feature is that you don't have to freeze the instrument through the whole song. You can choose to freeze it for 2 bars and then make it playable again afterwards (in realtime of course). That's a good feature if you want to be able to hear everything in realtime and right away record something afterwards without doing anything else than you normally would do if you hadnt ran out of voices.
You will only see the midi-notes and no audio like the normal freeze function in Cubase. You can choose how many channels you want to freeze at a time and which ones of course. Unfreezing works like a charme also.
The way you freeze a track for a certain amount of time is to simply press freeze in the Wrapper and then push the play button in Cubase. When you want the freeze to stop you just press stop. So you can freeze it for 10 seconds or bars and then make it playable instantly after without hearing any pops or crackling. And no audio channel have to be made.
If you try to play the piano on the partly frozen track you can play just before the freeze and just after. If you play that channel while freezing nothing happends (like with a normal audio-channel).
One thing to know is that it's not possible to freeze the whole VST-Virus plugin at a time. Then you will get the no go screen again from Virus. Thats probably because the Wrapper just let Cubase take over. But you can still freeze all the tracks you prefer at once, just check the midi-channels in the Wrapper instead of pushing the Global-freeze button.
Now I think that's a nice thing ;-).
Buy a PC then.