Okay, this is day-2 of fixing a live drum performance (admittedly it's a complex 6-minute prog thing). It should have been a 3-hour job, but my new version of Logic (10.7.9) just won't play ball and I am back to manual editing like it's the year 2000 again.
1) The transient detection function is simply broken: it misses each kick hits by a predictable millisecond or two and I have to manually go in and move each detection. It recognises the snare transients much better but not perfectly and I still need to go through and check/correct each transient. Either way, it is easier to just manually cut each transient myself directly on the region, like in the "old days".
2) If I do correct the transient recognition, I cannot right-click and select Slice-At-Transient-Marker without selecting Flex & Follow on the track inspector: I do not want this option selected as the tempo changes on this project are complex and this function seems to visually move the audio files around making it hard to tell what I am actually cutting (I also think changing this setting is responsible for issue 3, below).
3) After finally getting some sort of workflow going yesterday, I noticed Logic had inserted hundreds of cuts in the edited regions that I had to manually fix-up (3-hours): these cuts didn't fall on a transient but weren't totally random either, they seemed to appear somewhat near every edit and were not time-aligned aligned across the regions, despite the regions being grouped and Edit/Quantize-Locked together. It would have been easier to just start again, but the drums are a complex comp and I no longer am able to find out where each part is from, which is my bad, I will have to build this safety net back into my workflow.
(image above, this is after manually correcting the transient-detections on the kick and snare, engaging Flex & Follow to reveal the Slice At Transient function and then letting Logic do just that: luckily I have undo).
4) Forward playhead to next transient doesn't work - it just send me to another part of the song.
I have been working in Logic FOREVER and whilst I won't pretend I am an expert on Flex, it has always been helpful in identifying transients and cutting the regions on those transients, allowing me to quantize the regions from the Event List and then quickly deal with the gaps and overlaps. I have never liked the sound of Flex's own quantize-audio function and can always hear it working, although I do occasionally try it again incase the algorithm has improved.
A lot of my projects involve drums being added LAST in the process, which is super-common these days and Flex should make this simple, but it doesn't seem to be helping me at all at the moment, in fact quite the opposite.
Has something about Flex substantially changed since my old Logic system 10.3 (which worked perfectly for my workflow)? I will have to spend time finding a new workflow which is frustrating, but it would be DOUBLE frustrating if this is actually a bug in the software version and is fixed in a future release.
Oh, the snap-to-zero thing (above) does now mean I can manually move transient detection lines around, thanks!
I wonder if this being a project started on Logic 10.3 and continued in 10.7 has anything to do with it? I will create fresh 10.7.9 projects for my drum recording sessions next week.
Rant complete. Back to drum editing 😉