Perfect Play Mode: pre-render as long as required for drop-out free audio

[PitchSlap]

My first DAW was Cool Edit Pro in the 90's on a Pentium 233 and it had a killer feature I still miss daily even with 16-cores.
Regardless of whether the project CPU load was 80% or 500% whenever I'd play press I could always count on perfect playback without dropouts.

How? Because CEP originated a similar concept as Reaper's anticipative FX processing, but rather than being static number of ms buried in the settings, it constantly background mixed and pre-rendered as long as it damn-well needed to.

Now close to 25 years later I'm stuck listening to endless test revisions of projects in Winamp just so I can hear them with master fx enabled, or not crapping out in different sections.
There has to be a better way than freezing 50 tracks or creating multiple sub-projects (especially with unutilized CPU while stopped).

I've long advocated for something like Dynamic Anticipative FX Render-Ahead Time Based On System Load, but at a minimum there should be a playback mode for dropout free playback.
I don't care if I have to wait 30 seconds for playback to start when the alternative sounds like sections of my mix are being run through Destroy FX Buffer Override.


There's multiple ways to approach this.

See Also:
Steinberg ASIO-Guard