des99

Yes - the hardware reports the I/O it has to your Mac (and thus, Logic). There is no additional configuration you need to do in Logic, Logic can output to the outputs your Focusrite tells you Mac it has, or to record from the inputs it tells your Mac it has. Logic, and the hardware is working as expected. However, almost all audio interfaces have an additional layer of complexity, in that they essentially all have internal routing and mixing functions that sit between the Mac, and the physical I/O sockets. While this does make things more complex, it makes the interface more flexible. For example, you can directly route the inputs of the interface to it's outputs, thus monitoring with zero latency or mixing in external hardware, rather than going to and from the computer. Or you can configure the outputs to send to multiple output copies, so for example you send to Outputs 1 & 2 from Logic, but in audio interface, it takes those software returns and outputs them to both hardware Outputs 1 & 2 and also Outputs 7 & 8 to a different monitoring system - lots of things you can do with this kind of flexibility. This is a function of the interface, and is controlled and handled by it's control panel software - Focusrite Control in this case. While by default it will come shipped in a sensible configuration, because you can route and mix and change that setup, you'll need to check things are routed as you expect. Essentially, you mostly want the inputs *not* routed or mixed to the interface's outputs (you usually want them to go to the DAW for recording and software monitoring, generally), and that the software returns (ie, the outputs from the Mac) and going to the same respective hardware outputs (because they don't *have* to be routed like that - there's a layer of abstraction between the software returns - the outputs from the software - and the actually hardware outputs). You can also configure what is sent to each headphone output, as these can have different mixes of source signals too. If you get stuck with the routing in Focusrite Control, likely uninstalling, rebooting, and reinstalling will probably reset your audio interface back to it's factory shipped configuration, which will reset any additional user set routings, and revert to a more sensible default configuration. As said above, you can use the metering on the control panel software to check your incoming and outgoing signals and make sure they are being routed where you expect.

Fusion drives are notorious for performing terribly for these applications, lots of people have problems with them. If you are stuck with it, I recommended getting an external SSD drive and recording your projects to that, and avoid doing any performance-critical work on a Fusion drive if you can.

GForce M-Tron Pro IV Presets from the Mellotron plugin. M-Tron Pro IV.zip Instructions: Once unpacked, Copy the "Factory" folder to ~/Library/Audio/Presets/GForce/M-Tron Pro IV/ (that's the Library folder in your home directory) Index to this thread by Type / Manufacturer / Plugin: Third-party Patches Index

Indeed - digital playback doesn't just playback the raw samples - that's not how digital audio works. The original waveform audio is reconstructed *perfectly* (up to the Nyquist limit) via reconstruction filters. If your audio, for example, has no frequency content above 20K, it doesn't matter whether you play it back at 48KHz, or 192KHz - the reconstructed waveform will be *identical* in both cases (assuming the devices are functioning correctly). There is no "the 48KHz will sound bad" thing going on, due to some kind of "lower resolution" type thing - digital audio doesn't work like that (although there are a lot of myths and misconceptions resulting from an incomplete understanding of what is admittedly not that intuitive if you don't already know how it works.)

Exactly - if you have two (or more) MCU devices, you can use them individually, so each device would show 8 parameters/channels per page, or you can group them, in which case they act as one combined device, and a page is now 16 parameters/channels (or more, depending on how many units you have) split over both units. It sounded like from your description you had two devices grouped, but were only looking at one device, and therefore only seeing half the parameters/channels per page.

I don't have that controller, but check that it's on it's own "row" in the control surfaces setup window, and not being shared with another MCU on the same "group", so it splits it's controls over multiple devices.

Yep, I agree for the use cases that make sense, your suggestions are sound... 👍

As their main rig, yes, will be fun. I sort of am as an occasional extra, in that I have an old G4 Powerbook with Logic 6 on it, and I also have a Snow Leopard VM for running PPC apps on my Intel Mac, and I use that from time to time to access old PPC-only software...

Personally I don't think smart controls are a good solution (at least as far as I'm concerned!). With plugin parameters ordered by CSParameterOrder, it always just works when you load a plugin, anywhere, on any insert. With smart controls, you have to set up a Patch for each plugin you use, and load it from there (otherwise, if you just load a plugin, none of the smart control mappings will be there), and manually map smart controls, and other downsides. I don't use smart controls at all for this reason - I think they're a good solution to add simple macro controls to Logic factory content, and for people that want to take the time to set these up for their instruments or patches, but I don't think they're a good general control solution at all. It's too much work to use them imo. And it certainly won't do away with CSParameterOrder files - you shouldn't have to write these custom BTW, you can get Logic to generate them, then it's a simple matter to reorder in a text editor (this is trivial compared to setting up smart controls), and from then on it will aways just work. I'm less sure why there is an arbitrary control limit to smart controls though, and I can see how that can be limiting for the people that use them. I guess the Logician's saw them as a way to create quick, simple macro controls for a channel strip (and the factory content), not so much to start making complete editors and new GUIs etc. And yes, if there were more smart controls available, ideally the MCU implementation should let you access all of them.

Omnisphere *is* amazing, top quality (and pricey), but it's not really a bread and butter thing - it's more a synthesizer/sample-library hybrid, perfect for cinematic scores and TV work, but if you're looking to do pop arrangements with more conventional/typical sounds, it's probably not the best thing for that imo. It sort of really depends what you're looking for - Omnisphere really is a whole world to itself, and the interface is quite straightforward, but due to the nature of it's browser, would be way to much work to save out as Logic presets - so you'll need to check how it works with your screen reader etc.

Yep, this is how AU V2 plugins are distributed. When you install the app, the plugin is then available to Logic and other AU-compatible hosts. They work fine.

GForce Axxess Presets from the Arp Axxe emulation plugin. GF Axxess.zip Instructions: Once unpacked, Copy the "Factory" folder to ~/Library/Audio/Presets/GForce/Axxess/ (that's the Library folder in your home directory) Index to this thread by Type / Manufacturer / Plugin: Third-party Patches Index

So for a wide range of sounds, a "rompler"-type keyboard instrument is often a good idea (which is why I suggested the Korg Triton). These will give you hundreds of thousands of sounds, from bread and butter stuff, pianos, ethnic, guitars, synths, brass, drums and so on. You'll get more sounds for your money than sample libraries, they don't take up more space, they are super quick to load and the instruments are multi-timbral, so one plugin instance can do multiple different sounds at once. Dedicated sample libraries will contain fewer, more detailed and much larger sounds which will sound good but be slower to load, take up more disk space, and won't cover as wide a range. You're better off in my opinion (at least from what you say) to get a general purpose instrument, and then supplementing it with the odd sample library for particular areas. I think the Korg Triton might be a good fit - take a listen to some demos/sounds - the plugin (it's actually two plugins) is essentially identical to the full hardware versions released back in the late 90s. More info here - it's quite pricey still, but Korg do do sales from time to time: https://www.korg.com/uk/products/software/kc_triton/ Or Roland have a subscription service with some similar plugins (or they can be purchased individually.) There are also a good amount of free plugins which you can draw on too if you want to explore those.

It is, but obviously a lot of features from later versions don't exist in earlier versions, so when you backport, you have no guarantee it's going to be useful, unless you steer clear of those features.

You won't be able to do this, the project formats, and feature differences between versions, are too great. Correct.