des99

It's an "implied Tap", no need to be overt in these things... 🙂

Indeed. The copyright issue is not so much in processing that audio (we've been able to record and edit copyrighted audio for decades), but in *doing* anything with it, eg, releasing a record containing audio under copyright that you don't own or have permission for. Stem separation is a genuinely useful tool, that, like many tools, can be put to more nefarious uses... If it works well, it will be a time saver to have it in Logic, but if other tools do it better, I'll probably still go to those to do it.

Have you tried doing a File -> Refresh Library? I can't find Handheld vowels at all by the way, in the preset, or legacy content - where's that from? Edit - Ok, found it manually - but "vowels" didn't find it in search either. But, it does now when I tried again. Definite weirdness going on here(!) but mine now seems to be working as expected.

Hmm, I can't reproduce that here... Do any other searches work as you expect? Are you searching "All" presets? However I do get matches where "alien" doesn't seem to be in the name, or the tags, so I'm stumped as to how those are matching or what's going on in the backend... (Edit: Ok, the word was in the performance pads area in that case, so it's ok...)

Log into the App Store on the new machine. Download Logic. Then check this article:

See: "macOS Ventura is compatible with these computers" https://support.apple.com/en-gb/102861

So I'd suggest to do a little bit of level juggling - first, put the audio interface gain where you are getting the optimal signal, without clipping. Peaking at under -12dBFS is fine, averaging down in the -20dBFS is OK too. Now, if you are struggling with monitoring, it's likely that your mix in Logic is super loud (ie, up in the 0dBFS peak range.) Turn your tracks down, and when your track is record enabled, turn the level of that fader up (faders have an independent level when in record mode) and see if you can get a monitor balance you're happy with. If not, you can always put a gain plugin, or compressor plugin, on that channel which will also non-destructively add gain. Juggle with these things until you can find a happy balance that works for you, and things will be much better, and yes, turn your monitoring up to compensate bringing the mix down. If you want to run through a mic-pre, then a hardware compressor, then into your audio interface, then go for it, if that works better for you and you can generate a hotter signal without clipping. But I think the main problem is often people are running their mixes a super-loud, and recording quite low, and struggling to achieve a balance. In this case, giving proper mix headroom to bring those elements down will help a lot - you can make up the final gain towards the end of the process after the recording is done. Your problem isn't fixed by printing software compression into the files - it almost never is, which is why I responded as such in the first post. There's almost no reason to do this. 👍

I have no idea what your computer is. You'll need to determine whether your computer can run Ventura first.

Yes, but I'm talking about more analog modelled saturation, tube overdriving, transformers and other stuff - this is a world away from the more simplistic digital distortions which we've had forever, and is much more complicated and processor intensive.

That sounds more like a mic/interface problem. What levels exactly? If you're cranking your preamp and averaging at, say, -18dBFS, you can reduce the gain a bit and your signal is fine. If you turn up the recorded signal afterwards, does it sound OK? Perhaps your audio interface doesn't have much gain? With a hardware unit? This is common, but it doesn't do the same thing as using a plugin for this, which is mostly why it's pointless. A plugin doesn't optimise the gain stage like a hardware unit does, because the plugin comes *after* the gain stage - at which point, you might as well just put it on the channel, rather than burning it into the audio, because it's *not* doing what a hardware compressor before the audio interface does.

No. You need a machine running Ventura 13.5 as a minimum system requirement.

Sure, but that's true of almost every feature in a given DAW or application. If you don't want to use that DAW, you can't use that DAW's featureset either. It's just another plugin, that people who are already using Logic can use (or not, they can still use third-party ones too). A lot of people using Logic aren't using third-party plugins at all, and I would argue that Logic doesn't to date actually have a good solution for saturation, other than overdriving the tape delay plugin, (Edit: As Mike points out, the PhatFX has distortion too - thanks) and as saturation has become an important part of a modern sound, having one in Logic is a good thing, imo. We do this with third-party plugins anyway. I don't really see it that way at all. it's just another tool you have available, for free, that someone can choose to use or not. I don't see any platform freedoms being restricted here, and nor is it anyway different to using, say, the ES2 or Sampler etc in Logic, which are only available in Logic, or any feature or internal plugin in Ableton Live, or anything else... And there's always third-party options which work cross-DAW/platform, so if platform interoperability is important to a user, they will tend to leave the features that don't port alone (or render them into their audio files) and use third-party tools. Either way, the user has the choice. :shrugs:

Yes, an application can retrieve the window title on the system.

The main window contains the name of the project: