More Zooming Drama

It's absolutely ridiculous how this got messed up. Have a look:

As you can clearly see, the zoom rectangle covers a *lot* more of the upper audio region, yet, *only* the lower region is zoomed in, there's nothing, zilch, nada of the upper region to see.

This is just completely wrong and in case you'd do it like that in a professional photo editing application you'd get slaughtered by your users the day you release such a nonsense.

Has *never* been an issue in any previous versions of Logic and has always been one of *the* most elegant things in terms of part handling and the likes.

This is still driving me mad on a daily base as zooming in like that has become a second nature to me for almost 20 years already.

And well, while we're at it, I do know the workaround: The rectangle has to start above the center of the upper track and end below the center of the lower track. But that requires a whole lot more patience and very precise mouse movements - which have never been required before LPX.

Needs to be adressed - especially as it's not just something "less comfortable" but clearly a bug (see GIF above, that can't be considered "to be expected" behaviour by any means).

And Apple, while you're at it: Fix the zoom in piano roll as well (can't zoom in horizontally or vertically only anymore, using the rectangle-drawing method), raise the "tolerance width" for vertical/horizontal only zooms in both the arrange and the (then repaired) piano roll, and - friggin' most of all - repair the zoom level memory, which is completely broken too!

I have no idea how often this needs to be reported until there's something done about it. Guess I will still send Apple zoom bug reports in 10 years to come.

I agree with you that this zooming behavior is very frustrating.

First, let's note that Logic's magnifier tool is far from intuitive. I'm not saying it should be changed, I like the way it works (or at least I like the way it is supposed to work). But in my classes, when I show the magnifier tool to students, ALL of them (not some, not many, not most, but ALL) just click somewhere with the magnifier. They'll click a region with the magnifier, expecting Logic to zoom in where they clicked.

So I carefully explain that Logic's magnifier, unlike the magnifier tool in other apps, is a much more powerful tool. However it requires a little more work: you have to draw a rectangle over an area, and whatever area you've highlighted with the tool is what becomes expanded to fit the pane you're in. Well... that used to be the behavior. Only now it isn't anymore. Logic is now smarter than you, and if you draw a rectangle in the wrong area, it is smart enough to know better, so it will zoom in on another area, the one you should have wanted to zoom in on in the first place.

I mean, in your gif for example, surely there's no reason why you'd want to zoom in on half a track and half the one below? See, Logic knows that, and for that it will correct your action and zoom in only on the track below, completely ignoring what you requested.

But in that case, do we truly need such a complex tool? What's the point of having to draw a rectangle if Logic isn't going to respect what we're drawing? Maybe we could make the magnifier tool a click tool, since Logic knows better than us what we intend to zoom in on anyway. Or maybe we don't need a tool at all, just a key command for "Zoom in where you know better than I where I want to zoom in on"?

Or maybe we don't need a tool at all, just a key command for "Zoom in where you know better than I where I want to zoom in on"?

 

Yeah, that's likely to become the future of the Logic zoom.

On a serious note: Everything would be absolutely fine and dandy if it was working just the same as in all pre-LPX versions.

On another (interesting for me) sidenote: Just recently I talked about that with a good friend of mine, using Logic even a bit longer than me (he actually steered me towards it), one of the most accomplished Logic users I know, and when I asked him whether it wouldn't drive him completely mad that this function was now messed up so much, he told me he didn't even notice - uhm. But pssshhht! Nobody should know that, if we ever want this to be fixed, we should at least try to pretend it's the single most horrible plague to ever find its way into Logic (and fwiw, for me it is is).

An on yet another note: I know plenty of persons not even using any keycommands/combinations to zoom but still reach for the sliders (ugh, haven't even touched them in what must be at least 15 years...).

Fwiw, might as well be related that zooming in on extremely small regions (we're talking something around 1000 samples) is a plain nightmare in LPX, too. Grabbing and moving them is even more of a horror, really. But I'll save the details for another bug report.