Logic Pro Studio 9 - who is using it?

[Jason Hollar]

Upgraded to Express 9. Love the new Amp Designer stuff.

Having a very LOUD digital clipping sound on certain tracks from Express 8...mostly through the guitar/Amp channels.

Wonder if there's some bug between the two amp simulators -- or if I don't have some setting right?

 

[Charling]

Upgraded to Express 9. Love the new Amp Designer stuff.

Having a very LOUD digital clipping sound on certain tracks from Express 8...mostly through the guitar/Amp channels.

Wonder if there's some bug between the two amp simulators -- or if I don't have some setting right?

what exactly is the setup you are experiencing the clipping with? by guitar/amp channels do you just mean channels with a guitar amp plug in on?

The amp modellers for both logic 8 and 9 are just plugins and if you disable them then you will be able to hear exactly what is on the track. Is THAT still clipping? it shouldn't do, a track with no plugins will just play back the audio 'as is'. The mixer in logic has a HUGE headroom. you can distor a mixer channel MASSIVELY and it will not actually distort UNLESS a master bus distorts. its a great function of logic but one to get used to. If a track is distorting with no plugins check the master output, if that is not distorting then there is some kind of error.

secondly, logic 8's amp plugin is still in logic 9, if you open a logic 8 session in 9 with 8's amp plugin on one of the tracks it shouldn't make a difference. logic 9s amp designer is a seperate plugin.


what exactly is the situation that causes the clipping?

 

[MakiSupaStar]

Logic is a great software and very powerful on audio and MIDI. Version 9 brings some really nice features like the Flex editing and Drum replacing. The new Amp design and Pedal board are also really great and improved new plug-ins.

Above all for U$500 (U$200 upgrade) Logic comes with many audio EFX plug-ins, several virtual vintage and modern soft synths, a great sampler, a huge sound library and everything you'll need to start making music just out of the box. No track number limitations, no dongles, nothing to stop your creativity. Install, set it up according to your system…go!

That said, new Logic users may suffer from a very steep learning curve. In spite the program have recently passed over some big changes on its interface which made things easiest than previous versions and dramatically improved the overall workflow it is still a "Pro" software and not 100% intuitive.

Some bugs have been fixed but there are still many complains about it over the Logic forums. In my opinion most of them are just bad setup and poor operation skills.

Since Apple bought Emagic (former Logic maker) many long time users has complaining about the lack of official support from them, although Logic community is very friendly and supportive.

I use Logic since version 1 (composing, movies soundtracks, producing etc…) and love it very much. It's my Nº1 audio software. I also use Protools, Live, and many others program but I have found myself working most of the time just with Logic.

I'm not affiliate with Apple or Logic in any form. Just a Long time user and enthusiast.

Feel free to ask any other questions.

Best

Hey Depalm. I'm composing a lot of stuff using Live 7. We're looking at an upgrade, and the upgrade to Live 8 is at a similar pricepoint as Logic 9. Which would you recommend? We really dig live, so what would be the advantages/disadvantages moving over to logic?

 

[Jason Hollar]

Charling --

Thanks for your reply. I think I figured out what went wrong.

When I upgraded to either (or both) Logic Express 9 / 10.6 Snow Leopard, the settings for my Apogee Duet got funky.

I think (not 100% sure) that the Apogee was somehow triggering its white noise generator (to test speakers) and that was coming through on my armed tracks -- which just happened to be guitar tracks.

I maybe wrongly assumed the amp designer software was at fault -- but since I reset and saved the Duet settings, everything seems to be working fine.

That said -- I love the new amp software and things are cool.

 

[ghigo85]

I'm using Logic Pro 9 with Logic Studio suite.

Before I was working on a Windows-based system, then few months ago I put 4gb ram on my little MacBook and changed to Logic.

Very very good, here in Europe is 500euros, and there are some very good stuff.

About issues I had some troubles (I run Snow Leopard), mostly solved but still there are some problems.

For example I recorded few productions with many tracks and overdubs (around 35 tracks with several takes assembled), and when I reloaded the projects a message appeared:" Audio files changed lenght" and all the takes changed positions and some disappeared.

I had to literally trashed out all the projects. I then discovered that the problem was with FAT32 formatted external hard disk.

Now I have some problems with cross fades.
Sometimes (not often, fortunately) cross fade files become corrupted and I have to cancel them one by one and recreate all the fades.


However I'm really happy of Logic, amazing for producing music (in my home studio I work mainly for soundtracks and sound-design for tv spots, theatrical plays, audio video productions, etc...from this point of view it's wonderfull to have also Soundtrack pro).


Some effects are very good (for example SpaceDesigner reverbs, etc..), but sometimes you have to use different programs to find the best solutions (for example I find Logic denoiser very bad, it's better Soundtrack Pro function).

With Waveburner it's easy to obtain medium-good mastering sessions.

Compressor utility is very good if you work with video.

 

[ugly_bassplayer]

Still no help with my sampler question?

 

[Charling]

ghigo85, yeah Logic is a very complex program and as such it does have a tendency to be a little buggy doesn't it? Still not as buggy as pro tools though!

That said, using a FAT32 formated disk is definitely not reccommended and bound to cause problems, any important disk used with mac osx should be set to the mac file system!

what situation causes the crossfade bug? and what happens when they become corrupted?

Logic does come with a great suite of plugins, some of them really quite good, even the more 'serious' effects for want of a better word, like the compressors and eq's

the platinum comp is great on all but the 'platinum' setting, and the overdrive plugin is really useable for gently exciting tracks. Space designer rocks and delay designer is super powerful.

remember though, that like all programs, this is just a 'getting started' suite, and the more specialist plugins, like de-noisers, will almost always be better with a third party audio unit.

There are plenty of free plugins out there, many of which comparable to the paid-for ones. which is good because even a simple set of plugins can easily cost many times more than logic itself!

at ugly_bassplayer, I think its because your question was a bit confusing. If you have chopped a sound into a small region, ready to go into exs24 all you have to do is -

create a software instrument track, add the exs24, open it, click 'edit' in the top right, drag the chopped region into the top half of the grey box that appears, then add more samples of fiddle around with the first one.

creating a good sample map is a little fiddly and time consuming but you only have to do it once of course! once you can get one sample in, on the right root and right key then the rest is just repetition. The manual will help you with all the extra options the sampler can give you!

 

[ghigo85]

Hi Charling,

yes, the disk was my fault. I always worked with Windows-based DAW (my sound-engineer worked with Cubase, Nuendo, Wavelab, and so on), but I decided to go with my Mac, and I bought a new external hard-disk and started to use it as I did for PC, but of course it was FAT32. The tricky thing is that everything worked well, the problem of changing files lenght and position just happened randomly
Now I have 3 hdd formatted with Mac OS (Journaled).

I think it's a great suite Studio Logic.
It gives high-quality programs that can go from recording to mastering with extremely good results (yes, of course something can be little tricky and it's necessary to do strange tricks to obtain the best results, like using functions from several programs of the suite).

I completely agree with you, Platinum plugins are very good, then SpaceDesigner is like hi-quality IR rev (and it's great, as many IR rev are really expensive... ok, Wave IR1 is better, but it's around 800eu and SpaceDesigner does its job very good), Pedalboard has some nice things.

Of course, as you perfectly said, it's just a good start.
If someone need better plugin (for example I use several external plugin and hardware that I like) for his work you have to buy it specifically, but however there is really good material.

About fades problem: it happens that the files created for fades become corrupted and you ear other tracks instead of the crossfades (I mean, other audio that comes into the cross-fades, and it's pretty clear if you put the track in solo mode).

It happened three or four times to me, and all the fades become a real mess.

I had to remove manually all the fades and re-create them (and if you have a project with 50 tracks composed by many takes it takes a lot of time ).


However I am also impressed by the efficiency of the program also. I don't have a really powerful MacBook, just an Intel Corduo 2 2ghz, I put 4gbs ram, and I can work with more than 50 tracks with many plugins working streaming on each tracks.

I just finished to record a suite of contemporary music in which I played several tracks of viola da gamba and doublebass. I had 45 tracks with 4/6 plugins each track, no one freezed.

I just play the project and I don't have any problems.


With PC was almost impossible to do that.

I'm an happy user. Sometimes yes, little buggy, but till now I am happy.

 

[Jason Hollar]

One of the reasons I upgraded to 9 was to have the ability to edit & quantize audio tracks via Flex Time.

So, since we're all bass players here -- I took a pretty simple "straight 8's" rock groove bass line and tried tweaking it to make it rock solid.

I was able to edit everything pretty easily and got things to line up no problem.

Problem is -- the sound of the processed track is "jittery" and has I guess some ugly digital artifacts along with it.

I tried all of the various settings or modes that go along with the flex time edit (mono/polyphonic, etc.) but none really sounded any different to me.

Anybody experience this?

Also -- stoopid kweshchin -- and maybe I missed this in the manual -- but when you freeze a track that has Flex Time on it -- is the little freeze icon supposed to turn blue instead of green?

 

[pbass2]

This software is terrific. The flex time feature will save many hours. Fixing takes is beyond quick. Five stars

Ditto. I have been using Logic professionally full-time since v4, and I will say, that 9 really is the "best yet". I just updated one of my studio's rigs to L9/Snow Leopard and it has been working like a charm so far--with tons of hungry third-party stuff, etc. in tow. The new features in 9 are totally worth it. It still amazes me what you get for the price of Logic in general.
One thing I really notice is the L9/Snow Leopard combo appears to be very efficient CPU-wise. I'm running some pretty big projects with tons of hungry plugs and one core on a dual-core machine is barely up halfway, and the other is only at about a 1/4. I don't know all the ins and outs of what's involved with that, but the exact same project in L8 on Leopard was eating my CPU for breakfast . . .