Trouble Duplicating and Creating New Tracks

Hi all!

 

Just today Logic started melting my brain with this one...

 

Every time I duplicate a track, only the first instrument or plugin shows on the new channel strip with an orange circle and exclamation mark in the centre. I've had this orange circle appear before when I copy a project from another user and I don't have the plugin that they had on their machine, but I obviously have the plugins on my machine as I'm just duplicating a track.

 

When I try to create a new audio or midi track from scratch, a blank channel strip is created with no drop downs at all to select audio or midi instruments - just a long vertical grey bar with a volume fader at the bottom.

 

Related to this, tracks 1 and 2 in my project have a couple of sends set up, which automatically created their respective bus tracks in the mixer. But when I tried to create a send on track 3 of the project, it would create the send with the volume knob on the track channel strip as expected, but the mixer isn't showing any bus track unlike the first two I tried to route the send to bus, 5, 6, 25, anything, but it appears as though Logic doesn't want to let me create any more bus channels. I've used sends, aux channels and buses in Logic for years and never had anything like this happen before.

 

I have 25 tracks in my project so it's not an overload of tracks I don't think (I got to about 70 tracks on the benchmark test) and I have 16 GB RAM so I don't think it's a memory issue.

 

I've tried reverting to a system backup from a week ago, turning off every plugin on every track, opening other projects from the past and they're all behaving the same way

 

Has anyone experienced this before and might be able to shed some light on it? I must say, I think if Apple going to put that orange circle in there with the exclamation mark, it would make sense to add a 'hover over' pop-up that tells you why it's showing up in the first place.

 

Thanks in advance everyone!

 

Dave.

Did you update to Mojave lately?

Hi!

 

I updated to Mojave many months ago just after it got released and it was running fine until a couple of days ago. Is this a known issue with Mojave?

 

Thanks,

Dave.

Has anyone found a solution for this? I am still running El Capitan and suddenly the same thing has happened to me. It's driving me crazy as I am 80% of the way through a track and can't finish it because I can't add new tracks or even audio files. Core Audio is already enabled, as previously suggested in other threads.

Choose File > Project Settings > Audio and make sure automatic management of audio channel strip objects is selected?

Thank you for your swift reply!

 

I'm afraid it's checked.

 

I've attached another screen grab of the duplicated channel compared to other identical channels. It's completely blank.

This issue is in this specific project only? If that's the case then attach the project file here I'll have a look. How to attach files to your post

Okay - something interesting - I just removed a bunch of layers (to trim the file size ready to send over) and thought 'might as well try now' and it has suddenly started working! There is obviously a duff layer somewhere. Let me find the culprit and I will report on my findings, just in case it helps someone else...

It seems there isn't a broken layer, I just hit a maximum. As soon as I hit 122 layers it ceases to let me add more. I appreciate 122 layers may seem high, but at least half of them are single wav shots with specific effects.

 

Is there such thing as a capacity in Logic and, if so, can it be overridden somewhere?

I'm' not sure what you're calling "layers". If you mean instrument or audio channel strips, you should be able to have up to 1,000 of each type. You're in LPX 10.4.8 yes?

Apologies, I'm a designer by profession, so I'm used to referring to things as layers. I mean channel strips.

 

No, unfortunately I have an older Mac so can only run El Capitan and therefore (apparently) can't install 10.4.8 as it's incompatible.

I'm running 10.3.2

Logic Pro X 10.3.2 has up to 255 software instrument tracks and 255 audio tracks.

That's what I thought. Strange. I did have three channel strips with a (very) large assortment of MIDI patterns. Do you think Logic may just have reached a point where it couldn't cope?

Is it possible you have a bunch of unassigned channel strips in that specific file? If you open a new empty project, can you create 255 software instrument tracks as expected?

Just tried and yep, looks like I can. I had a few unassigned channel strips, but not many; maybe 10?

Well then maybe that's what was tripping up Logic? If you had some high numbered software instrument channel strip that already existed? This shouldn't normally happen but it isn't a "normal" situation either, where channel strips are deleted when their corresponding tracks are deleted.

I'll keep that in mind - I did wonder whether it was trying to create a channel that already existed somewhere in the shadows.

 

Thanks for your help! It's good to be able to crack on again.

Great! You're welcome.

Hi all!

 

David...I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unassigned channel strips’. Unassigned to what?

 

Anyway, I ended up doing a complete erase of my laptop and installing Logic from scratch. It was the only thing that fixed this issue on my machine. It took a good week or so to re-download and install all my plugins (not to mention locate all my serial numbers) but I’m back on easy street once again thankfully.

 

Cheers,

Dave.

 

P.S. I haven't upgraded to Catalina yet as I know at least one of my plugins isn’t yet compatible.

David...I’m not sure what you mean by ‘unassigned channel strips’. Unassigned to what?

To tracks in the Tracks area.

I think that unassigned channelstrip are objects that remain in the environment although the tracks that were assigned to them got somehow deleted.

Yeah just wondering how this could ever happen. I’ve been using Logic for about 12 years and any time I’ve deleted a track the channel strip has always been deleted. I know you can save channel strip settings, but I didn’t know you could have a channel strip with no track attached to it.

 

I get that you can delete any audio or midi regions on a track and still have the channel strip, but isn’t that the same as having the track?

 

Anyway, as I mentioned before I haven’t had this problem resurface (thankfully) since doing my full system reinstall.

It could happen for example if you reassign a track: you control-click a track header and choose an object in the environment to be assigned to the track, or you drag and drop an environment object to a track header. In that case the track is reassigned but the object it was previously assigned to still exist in the environment. When you later delete that track, the previously assigned object is not deleted from the environment.

This symptom is very similar to what happens when trying to create More then 127 tracks feeding a AU3 multi. Every new multi Timbral track creates an underlying channel strip in the environment. When you try to create a 128th track, logicpro doesn’t complain or report any error it just causes all of them to go blank in a similar way as the op is experiencing.

 

I think in the op’s case he is running into the 255 instrument limit in some way as David has already explained. I am only mentioning this similarity of behavior as confirmation that the strange behavior for going over the line is somewhat consistent.

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

 

Something that just sprung to mind is that I duplicate tracks a lot. This is usually because I want to try messing around with plugin settings and try different presets on a duplicate, but keep the original in case I want to go back to it. I'm pretty sure lots of Logic users do this. Once I'm happy with the sound I have though, I always either delete the duplicate track (if my messing around didn't amount to much) or delete the original track if the duplicate track sounds better.

 

Could I somehow be creating ghost objects by duplicating and deleting tracks this way?

 

If not, and I run into tis problem again, how can I locate and remove the offending objects to get back to some semblance of normality in my project?

 

TIA!