GeneralDisarray Posted September 22, 2022 Share Posted September 22, 2022 The reason I ask for this is that I'm a videographer and very used to NLEs like Final Cut Pro, Premiere and so on. I've had Logic Pro X for 6 years but it wasn't until recently that I started using it for more advanced functions. So I'm used to work with audio tracks in those NLEs and there are features that I use for certain tasks that I can't find in Logic, and part of it makes sense because it was designed with other workflow in mind, but I still wanted to ask here to see if I missed anything in my exhaustive search online and in the manual: 1) There doesn't seem to be a way to add markers to regions, only to the main project in the Markers track. This is something that surprised me because many times when you have to shorten a song, you have to find a way where the transition will be seamless, so you can place a marker in clip A where you want to sync, and another in clip B. They can still be synchronized by looking at the waveform, but region markers would be very useful for many things. So there's no way to insert markers in regions? 2) Is there no way to shuttle like you do in FCP or Premiere? I mean, not jumping bar to bar, but just going left and right slower or faster depending on how many times you press J or L, and K to stop. I have a Contour Shuttle and it kinda works, but it seems to jump in steps, not smoothly. 3) This applies to the previous question, but also with the mouse. In FCP, you can listen to the audio as you shuttle, but also when you move around in the timeline with the mouse. It's called Skimming, and it's very useful for lots of different things. You would think that a program that is fully dedicated to audio would have such an important feature, but it doesn't seem to have it, am I right? Of course this wouldn't work for everything, like if you shuttle back and forth in a MIDI track, but it would still be useful for audio tracks. 4) Other than the arrangement markers, which I have come to hate, there doesn't seem to be a way to ripple delete and move the markers along with the region that they were set at initially. Is this the case? I'm probably forgetting about something. Please don't take this as criticism of Logic, I love the program and I think it has a lot of great features, I just would like to know if I missed something when searching for these, maybe because they are named differently. Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 22, 2022 Share Posted September 22, 2022 (edited) 1. Correct. I’d like Logic to have both timeline and region markers, similar to FCP, it is quite useful. 2. Not really, and part of the reason is you can’t just shuttle backwards MIDI data - there is no concept of playing a note from the end to the start. So while such a feature would work in an audio only context, it would be impossible to work in a broader use case of a tool that’s primarily for music, and it makes no sense to implement a feature that works in one limited use case but fails in the most common use cases. 3. You can scrub with the scissors tool and it behaves like this. There might be some other areas I can’t remember offhand… 4. Correct (sort of). Logic was always a song making tool and so these video focused features weren’t traditionally super important. Apple actually had an audio editor designed specifically for audio post use (Soundtrack Pro) but killed it, and Logic has sort of reluctantly taken over that role, but isn’t necessarily ideally suited for it currently. Feel free to submit feature requests to Apple though - I’m sure at least some of this stuff is on the list for them to do at some point… 👍 Edited September 22, 2022 by des99 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 24, 2022 Author Share Posted September 24, 2022 On 9/21/2022 at 11:15 PM, des99 said: 3. You can scrub with the scissors tool and it behaves like this. There might be some other areas I can’t remember offhand… Are you sure about this? I tried it, but the scissors tool only inserts cuts in regions. I did find a way to do something similar (not in the same way as FCP), but going to the editing pane and selecting the File tab, then clicking and holding the playhead and moving it back and forth the waveform. It scrubs the audio but in a way that I find erratic, because when you move the mouse left and right, the mouse pointer moves faster than the playhead, which is playing catchup with the pointer. But in the main timeline, I haven't found a way to do this. Unless of course you referred to the icon for the editor, which is a pair of scissors. But I have to thank you for this regardless, because now I know about the scissors tool. Part of what I use Logic for is to digitize my vinyl records, and the scissors tool provides an easier way for me to make the cuts at the beginning of each song. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JakobP Posted September 24, 2022 Share Posted September 24, 2022 (edited) To scrub (audio and midi) in the tracks area, playback needs to be paused. There's also a preference to enable audio scrubbing in Preferences > Audio > Editing. Scrub a project in Logic Pro Edited September 24, 2022 by JakobP 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 24, 2022 Share Posted September 24, 2022 2 hours ago, GeneralDisarray said: Are you sure about this? Well, I've been using Logic for very nearly 30 years, so unless they've changed something very recently, yes, pretty sure! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 24, 2022 Author Share Posted September 24, 2022 8 minutes ago, des99 said: Well, I've been using Logic for very nearly 30 years, so unless they've changed something very recently, yes, pretty sure! This is getting weirder, because you mentioned that you've been using it for 30 years, so you definitely know what you're talking about, and JakobP above told me about scrubbing, so I looked that up, and I'm totally puzzled. Apparently Logic has scrubbing for MIDI tracks and you can also enable it for audio tracks in the preferences. So I went there, enabled it, and it doesn't scrub anything when I grab the playhead and move it back and forth. The help says you have to press the pause button. I don't know if by that it means you actually have to press it, or simply stop playback if it's playing. If you actually have to press a "Pause" button, well, that's not a choice. Even if you customize the control bar and display, there's no chance to enable it, it's grayed out. And if I choose any of the preset modes like Beats & Project or Beats & Time, the pause checkbox remains unchecked. And I tried selecting all of the other modes, the pause button is not in any of them. If you want to stop playback and you want to use the mouse instead of the space bar, you click on the stop button, which then turns into the Go to beginning one. Do I maybe have some sort of problem with corrupted preferences? Do you guys actually see the pause button? I was able to do some scrubbing by assigning shortcuts to the scrub rewind and forward commands, for which I did Cmd+J to rewind and Cmd+L to forward. And even if I enabled the "Scrubbing with audio in the tracks area" setting, it doesn't touch the audio track, which is not muted and plays along with the MIDI tracks when I hit the space bar. And this is really slow, it plays back at half speed, not double like I selected, and I have to keep the keys pressed to scrub, when I lift my fingers it stops. But the thing is, even with that selected, it only plays the MIDI notes as the playhead gets to them. So if anyone has a clue about what's going on, please tell me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Solution des99 Posted September 24, 2022 Solution Share Posted September 24, 2022 (edited) 26 minutes ago, GeneralDisarray said: So if anyone has a clue about what's going on, please tell me. No worries - when I said as an example you can do this scrubbing with the scissors tool, you can. This is using the scissors tool, not grabbing the playhead. This thread describes how the scissors tool scrubbing works, rather than re-typing it: I'm not saying this feature is perfect for your use case (that was never the point of mentioning it), just that Logic *does* implement scrubbing in some places, that can be useful or not, depending on what you're trying to do. It's an edit feature, designed to help you locate the points you're going to cut with the scissors tool - much in the way that old-schoolers would scrub the tape across the heads to locate an exact edit point - that's the metaphor Logic is using here. I also mentioned (and you've found some of them) that there are some "other areas" that involve scrubbing (to various degrees) but wasn't in a position to check all of them, or even remember all of them offhand, together with the exact behaviours and use of them to thoroughly describe them, so I skipped the detail on those but we can go into those other options if necessary... Edit: I just checked, and scrubbing in pause mode grabbing the playhead works for me, with scrubbing enabled in the prefs. Go into pause mode (if we can figure out what's happening with your pause button) and grabbing the playhead *does* scrub audio for me. BTW I'm not really sure offhand about your pause button thing offhand (maybe your screen isn't large enough to display it, perhaps?), but the various transport buttons have configurable behaviours, so for example the Stop button doesn't necessarily need to behave how you currently have it set, or what the defaults are. You can control/right click on the play and stop buttons etc to choose some configurable behaviours for these. Edited September 24, 2022 by des99 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 24, 2022 Author Share Posted September 24, 2022 Hey des99, thanks for checking into that for me and posting such a long and helpful post. About the pause button being grayed out, it was some kind of a glitch. I thought I would just start a new project, and just drop a song in there just to see what happened. When I went to the customize thing, this time I was able to select it. Can't say I'm thrilled about the way it works though. It's nothing like FCP or any other NLE. It's just weird. If the pointer is the current tool, it's more or less fine if you're going back, but moving the playhead to the right causes to just play the song, which can be at normal speed or double depending on what you selected in the settings. If you move it to the left, it scrubs more or less fine, but it's not as snappy as FCP. And if I moved it to the left and then start moving to the right, it starts catching up with the playhead at really fast speed. Worst of all, if the playhead is at the beginning of the timeline, there's no scrubbing at all, you move it to the right and it starts playing, not scrubbing. And with the scissors tool selected, it's even more bizarre. As much as I love Logic and think it has great features, I have no idea what they were thinking about. Because in this case the playhead does follow the mouse to wherever you move it, left or right, but, what gets played doesn't have anything to do with what's at the playhead at that moment. I mean, as it is, it's completely useless because to be useful it needs to play always what is at the playhead, not something from like 20 second before or after. If I missed anything please let me know, but I don't see how that would work at all for anyone. I will use the scissors tool, but in a visual way, like I mentioned, to divide the different songs in a vinyl record I captured. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 24, 2022 Share Posted September 24, 2022 1 minute ago, GeneralDisarray said: It's nothing like FCP or any other NLE. Yes indeed, a DAW is a very different beast to an NLE, and doesn't work in the same way, despite some similar concepts, a timeline and such. I don't see the scrub problem exactly as you describe (eg I don't get audio from 20 seconds away from the scrub point), but scrub speed depends on cursor position and the behaviour might take a little getting used to. (I'm not necessarily suggesting it's a wonderful implementation of this either.) Having said that, I'm not a big scrubber generally, and have never found it that useful, except in the odd case - part of the reason why the full range of scrub options didn't immediately come to mind -particularly as audio and MIDI can't behave the same in this regard, and most of us use both heavily in projects. But it's important I think when moving from one set of tools to another tool, not to bring the expectation that everything should work just as my previous tools did, and attack each on it's own merits and learn the necessary toolset and behaviours - as sometimes that expectation can interfere, and I've seen that quite a bit over the years - it's quite common for people to keep trying to make something work they way they expect based on other systems, rather than learning how it *actually* works (note I'm not saying this directly about you as such, just as a more general case that I see a lot when people moving between DAWs, or these kinds of tools generally). And for sure, when I went to learn FCP, or After Effects, or Nuke or whatever, I certainly didn't expect them to work like Logic..! 😝 Lastly - you don't need to use scissors to cut either, there are other ways to do that (eg the marquee tool). In Logic, there are often many ways to achieve a particular task, and those things become clearer over time as you do more and more work with it. As always, if in doubt about how to achieve or configure something, make a post and ask and we'll do our best to help. We're quite easy going here..! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 2 hours ago, des99 said: But it's important I think when moving from one set of tools to another tool, not to bring the expectation that everything should work just as my previous tools did Fair enough. And to be honest I didn't, because perhaps I haven't used Logic as much as I'm using it now (I just spent a considerable amount of money in sample libraries and I'm finally serious about making music, so it has become the software I use the most these days), but I have owned it for 6 years and I knew it wasn't going to be the same as FCP or Premiere. However, I think that Logic certainly would benefit from bringing some of FCP's tools and behaviors. It's not just the habit of using NLEs, some things are just logical, like on anything that has a timeline, usually pressing the left and right keys will move the playhead backward or forward. In Logic, if I'm in the Piano roll, it goes from one note to the next, not so bad, but in the timeline I don't even know what it does, or what's the goal. It just goes from one region to another, and so far, I can't see how that behavior is better than just moving backward and forward a bit at a time. Since Logic doesn't exactly have frames like NLEs, I would say make it move in tens of a second, and with Shift pressed, then one second at a time. I find that every time I have to go back a few seconds I need to use the mouse and place the playhead where I want it, and it's not like you can just grab it from anywhere in the vertical line, it has to be the top of it, or click in the ruler. But maybe it's just that I need to setup a lot of key commands and change some default ones. 2 hours ago, des99 said: I don't see the scrub problem exactly as you describe (eg I don't get audio from 20 seconds away from the scrub point) I'm going to try that again later. Maybe it was a glitch. The pause thing was, for example. When I reopened the same project that had it grayed out, it was selectable, so who knows. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) 9 hours ago, GeneralDisarray said: However, I think that Logic certainly would benefit from bringing some of FCP's tools and behaviors. It's not just the habit of using NLEs, some things are just logical, like on anything that has a timeline, usually pressing the left and right keys will move the playhead backward or forward. Well, they're logical for those people who have been brought up on NLE's. I can tell you that the whole J,K,L thing etc certainly isn't anyway logical to those who haven't! Remember, you're coming at DAWs from a particular direction, and therefore already have a set of behaviours and conventions and habits already known. And many of these behaviours can be customised if you want Logic to work differently (see the Key commands list for options). I can't personally see much use for using the cursor keys to move the playhead either, that seems very slow to navigate your project to me, harkening back to the days where we had to slowly shuttle tape around (I don't miss them!) - but then I come from a DAW perspective... If I want to shuttle the playhead around, I can always use the shuttle wheel on a controller, but I don't tend to do that much either, as it's quite slow. There are many playback and navigation tools, techniques and options, but for example a good one to use is to have "Play from selected region" ticked under the play button - now pressing play with a region selected will immediately being playback from the start of that region, which is much faster than scrolling the timeline back over the course of half a second or whatever time it takes to scroll the playhead back manually. And markers too work similarly, so you can immediately play from your verse, or chorus, and jump around your project etc. At the risk of sounding like I'm arguing, and while I totally understand what you're saying, the reality is that different tools are different, and their feature sets, and the way they work, are best designed around the tasks they are performing. I mentioned this as an example already as to why a DAW *can't* really work like NLEs in many regards (there are others too), but here's a simple one. In an NLE, you can easily play backwards. Press J rather than L, and you're playing backwards - and this is reasonably simple to achieve in an NLE, you just read out and display the rendered frames (and play the audio samples) in the reverse order. You'll have noticed that there is no "play backwards" in Logic. This is partly because it generally serves little purposes to play your project backwards (and should you want to for creative effect, there are ways of reversing audio etc), but mostly because you actually *can't* simply play a DAW project backwards in a meaningful way, for a number of reasons. While audio can be played backwards, plugins that process audio, particularly time-based processes likes reverbs or delays can't simply run backwards for technical reasons - they would have to be outputting processed audio before it's happened - and while you could theoretically architect an audio system to buffer the whole project and then play the resultant audio backwards, it's a huge technical challenge for very little outcome. Which is why a "J" shortcut command doesn't do "play in reverse". And secondly, DAWs don't just handle digital audio, they handle MIDI too, and again, you can't play MIDI backwards to match the backwards playing audio. Even if you say "Ok, in backwards play mode, we'll just play the MIDI events in reverse order", firstly it won't sound as intended (pitch bend messages before a note will do nothing, for instance, whereas forwards they will bend the already sounding note) but secondly, because the audio that's being played by external synthesisers/instruments is still regular "forwards" audio, because external synths and gear can't just play backwards either - if you sit at a piano - as an example - and want to play backwards, the piano would have to start sounding notes before you'd played them. It's non-sensical for real instruments, will never work, and would be a complete mess if they tried. Does anyone reading this know of another audio+MIDI DAW that lets you play a project backwards? I don't know of any, for just these reasons... The point being that although, coming from an NLE perspective, it would be comfortable if Logic worked in many regards like an NLE - ( just like people coming from, say, a Pro Tools perspective, would be more comfortable if Logic worked like Pro Tools, etc) - it doesn't because in many cases the concepts and the technical processes going on are quite different, and the tasks these tools are designed for have different sets of constraints and implementation challenges. Now - I love FCPX, and also used FCP long before it was FCPX (4.x to 7.x) - and Logic predates the *first* version of Final Cut by five or more years, so the NLE conventions hadn't even really begun to form when Logic had already gone through a few major versions, and evolved from a straight MIDI sequencer into a DAW. Also - much as I love FCPX, I'd *love* for some of FCPX's audio tools to work more like Logic's too (aside from the plugins which FCPX took directly from Logic). And I wish they'd add back in the MCU support to FCPX they once had in FCP. But working in FCPX, I've had to learn how *it* works, not how I'd like it to work... There's *always* room for improvement in all these tools, of course, and Logic is certainly no different. And if there are good tools, or improvements you'd like in Logic (we all have our personal lists of these!), you can always submit feature requests to Apple. Anyway - interesting discussion! 👍 But that's probably enough words from me on this... Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David Nahmani Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 9 hours ago, GeneralDisarray said: on anything that has a timeline, usually pressing the left and right keys will move the playhead backward or forward. In Logic, if I'm in the Piano roll, it goes from one note to the next, not so bad, but in the timeline I don't even know what it does, or what's the goal. In Logic, you can use the , and . keys (which are the ones that also have the < and > symbols) to move the playhead 1 bar at a time in the timeline. You can use the same keys along with Shift to move 8 bars at a time. By default the left and right arrows are assigned to Select Previous/Next Region/Cell/Event or Move Marquee End (or Marquee Point) to Previous/Next Transient. These behaviors are highly useful when editing regions. If you want to change those assignments, you can: in the Key Commands window, search for a command, click Learn by Key Label and press the desired key. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) 8 minutes ago, David Nahmani said: If you want to change those assignments, you can: in the Key Commands window, search for a command, click Learn by Key Label and press the desired key. If you search for eg "forward" and "rewind" you'll see those options that you can use: (It's been so long I used Logic's default key commands, I genuinely have no idea what the defaults are set to these days, which does make discussing specific key commands challenging... (!) ) Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 6 hours ago, des99 said: Anyway - interesting discussion! 👍 Most definitely, and I truly appreciate your insights on this, as well as your help. BTW, that pause button seems erratic, it seems to disappear and show grayed out in the customize bar and display settings, and I have no idea why. Is it by design, because maybe in one project I have something enabled that I don't in another? Or is it just a bug? I mean, I've seen Logic do weird things before that maybe a restart fixed. This one seems kind of like that. I was in one project with just 3 audio tracks, and the pause button wasn't showing and in the options it was grayed out. I restarted Logic, opened the same project, same thing. But then I reopened it, created a new project, and this time the pause button was showing, because I had already set it up as default. So I closed Logic, launch it, and choose the project that wasn't showing the pause button still wasn't, but now I was able to select it in the options, so now it shows. So my question is, is this actually a bug, or did I miss some setting that is causing this behavior? If this was Adobe software, I would assume it's a bug before anything else, but Apple is pretty good at making stable software. Of course they're not exempt from bugs like any other software, but they pay attention to the details rather than just introduce half baked and untested new flashy features rather than use resources to make their software stable and then work on new features. 6 hours ago, des99 said: for example a good one to use is to have "Play from selected region" ticked under the play button - now pressing play with a region selected will immediately being playback from the start of that region, which is much faster than scrolling the timeline back over the course of half a second or whatever time it takes to scroll the playhead back manually That's all good, but sometimes I just need to go back a few seconds, not to the beginning of a region. I have a Contour Shuttle, but I prefer to keep my hands on the keyboard if I can, but like you said, maybe it's the force of habit of 25 years using NLEs and being used to that behavior. 6 hours ago, des99 said: You'll have noticed that there is no "play backwards" in Logic. Well, that's not something I would care too much about. I would rather prefer the scrubbing to work more like an NLE on audio tracks. I disagree that it's not useful for MIDI tracks as well. Of course you don't get all the MIDI sound as intended for normal playback, but it plays the current note when you scrub over the beginning, and that is fine for the purpose of searching for something you're looking for. But the audio scrubbing should play the sample that is currently under the playhead, not playing catchup with the playhead as you move it, sometimes playing backwards in high speed if you moved it to the left, or normal speed if you moved it to the right. As it is, when I click and hold on the ruler where the playhead travels, it does a weird thing which is that the playhead and its line divides into two, and both start blinking. One stays in place where the mouse pointer is at, and the other starts moving forward at normal speed, and you can hear the music playing. Now, if you move it to the right, it doesn't move with your mouse motion, it starts playback at normal speed. And if you move it to the left, it plays in reverse to catch up to wherever you stopped the mouse. I just don't see any logic in that behavior as opposed to normal scrubbing. It does behave more normal when you are zoomed in quite a lot, like in the file editor in the bottom pane if you have it open. There it seems to behave more like I'm guessing an open reel tape would, not that I have any experience in that, but from videos that I've seen about it. And that I actually like! Look, don't take my criticism as me throwing crap at Logic, it's an excellent DAW, and that's what I use and will always use unless they discontinue it. For starters, it's amazing that Apple charged me only $200 for it in 2016 and gave me free updates ever since, like all of their products. Sure, their computers are more expensive than PCs, but you get a lot of bang for the buck. If you buy Cubase, ProTools, Studio One, etc, and have to pay for upgrades over 6 years, that adds up to a lot. Plus, I've seen the GUIs of most of those products, and especially ProTools and Cubase look like GUIs from 20 years ago, they're just ugly. I would hate looking at those GUIs all day long, Logic looks great. And this is a minor reason, but it's part of the reason I love Logic. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) Yep, I'm not taking it as criticism at all, I actually find different people's perspectives interesting and really useful, especially when people come at things from another angle. I'm not mimimising your experiences at all (I hope it doesn't come across that way, anyway!), but in discussing it, making you aware of other ways to achieve things and so on which you might not already be aware of. In terms of moving the timeline, as David mentioned there are key commands for this if you want to use them (I have a hardware jog wheel to which will move the playhead which is my preferred way rather than by keyboard). As far as the pause button goes, generally your window layouts etc are stored as part of the project, so you could configure one project with many parts of the transport removed, and a different project with them all enabled. This is good and useful, but also has some consequences if you just want it to be the same all the time, so Logic has a "defaults" feature (which by the looks you've found already anyway). (I've never seen it "greyed out" here, so I'm not sure what's happening there. Bug, possibly, I'm not sure offhand...) What I'd suggest to try is go to one of the projects where the transport is looking as you'd like, then click on Customise Control bar, and click "Save as default" to save that transport configuration. When starting new projects from scratch (ie not using a template), the transport should already come up that way from now on. And when you load an existing project where the transport isn't displayed how you'd like, use the "Apply defaults" button to force the current config to be as your default is saved - then save the project. Let me know how that works out for you, and if it doesn't fix the problem, we can diagnose further... Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) Oh, another way of quickly locating playback position that you may find useful is by using the marquee tool - you can single click anywhere on the background, and then hitting play will play from that point ("Play from Marquee selection" needs to be ticked under the play button for this to work). Or you can use the same tool to select a location or selection in an audio region and the same thing works. Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 1 hour ago, des99 said: What I'd suggest to try is go to one of the projects where the transport is looking as you'd like, then click on Customise Control bar, and click "Save as default" to save that transport configuration. When starting new projects from scratch (ie not using a template), the transport should already come up that way from now on. And when you load an existing project where the transport isn't displayed how you'd like, use the "Apply defaults" button to force the current config to be as your default is saved - then save the project. You know it's funny because I had done all of that last night, and still this problem persists. For example, yesterday afternoon I wanted to do something with Eastwest's Hollywood Orchestrator (film scores are my favorite genre and I aspire to be film and TV composer some day), so I created a new project and named it Hollywood Orchestrator. After that, we had that discussion here about the pause button, and it wasn't showing in that project. So I created a new project, and I did what you just mentioned because it's what makes sense. Earlier today, I created another project to do the same, and the pause button was actually there. I even did some scrubbing and it was fine. Then I opened some other projects (one at a time opened), and eventually I went back to the Orchestrator project, and this time the pause button was not there. So I opened the customization panel, and it was unchecked. I clicked on Apply Defaults, and now it shows checked but still grayed out: And, if I close this panel and then open it again, then it's unchecked again. So I would think it's a bug, I'll report it and see what happens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) Ok thanks, so it's not just the pause button that's greyed out, it's a whole bunch of options. I'll have a poke around and see if I can find anything about this... Edit: On a hunch - open a project where the options are disabled, then go to Preferences -> Advanced and uncheck, then re-check "Enable Complete Features", and then check to see whether those options are enabled now... If not, can you save that example project (you can delete the regions etc) and zip it up and attach it here, and I can see whether it loads in that state for me here... Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 1 hour ago, des99 said: Ok thanks, so it's not just the pause button that's greyed out, it's a whole bunch of options. I'll have a poke around and see if I can find anything about this... Yeah, and I remember at one point days ago I was just playing around and I had all the transport buttons enabled, which then I disabled some because it was too much and I didn't know what each of them did. 1 hour ago, des99 said: Edit: On a hunch - open a project where the options are disabled, then go to Preferences -> Advanced and uncheck, then re-check "Enable Complete Features", and then check to see whether those options are enabled now... Hey, that worked! Well, until I closed Logic and reopened the same project: But your suggestion was good, because now I can tell Apple that this perhaps has something to do with the advanced features options. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 Thanks - so I have some ideas about what might be going on. Can you quit Logic and trash your preferences (you can back them up first if you like). Your main Logic preference file is ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.logic10.plist (that's the Library folder in your user account, not the root Library - it's hidden by default, but if you don't know how to get there, in Finder, hold Option then click on the "Go" menu, and your home Library folder will be displayed there and you can get to it that way.) Delete or move that file to the desktop, and then restart Logic, and have a play to see whether the transport issue situation improves. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JakobP Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 At least here on Mojave it's also needed to restart the mac... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 5 minutes ago, JakobP said: At least here on Mojave it's also needed to restart the mac... Hmm, I can't recall a situation where I've *ever* had to restart the Mac to trash user preferences - and I've trashed a *lot* of prefs over the years! 😝 Once the file is gone and can't be found on startup, an app creates a new default set of prefs, and that's standard Mac app behaviour. But ymmv of course... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) 16 minutes ago, des99 said: Thanks - so I have some ideas about what might be going on. Can you quit Logic and trash your preferences (you can back them up first if you like). Nah, I like to live dangerously. Here goes nothing... (5 minutes later) Well, that worked, and hopefully it will stay that way from now on. Thank you!! Edited September 25, 2022 by GeneralDisarray 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 Awesome - hopefully it won't come back - if it does, it's definitely a bug, but at least you have some tools for dealing with it. 👍 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GeneralDisarray Posted September 25, 2022 Author Share Posted September 25, 2022 14 minutes ago, des99 said: Awesome - hopefully it won't come back - if it does, it's definitely a bug, but at least you have some tools for dealing with it. 👍 I'll still report it, because trashing preferences is far from an ideal solution. That was going to be my next move even before you suggested it, but in a program with tons of preferences like this, you have to spend time getting them back to what they were. So if it's once, fine, but if it keeps happening, I don't want to have to keep setting everything up from scratch over and over. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 Yep, totally agree... 👍 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JakobP Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 23 minutes ago, des99 said: Hmm, I can't recall a situation where I've *ever* had to restart the Mac to trash user preferences - and I've trashed a *lot* of prefs over the years! 😝 Once the file is gone and can't be found on startup, an app creates a new default set of prefs, and that's standard Mac app behaviour. But ymmv of course... Tried it again (my memory fails now and then ), and a reboot is definitely needed here. Must be Mojave specific, then... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 1 minute ago, JakobP said: Tried it again (my memory fails now and then ), and a reboot is definitely needed here. Must be Mojave specific, then... I've used all the macOS versions, and have been on Mojave for the last few years (essentially, since Logic 10.5 came out). I trash preferences so much (particularly while developing) that I have terminal scripts to reset preference files. Like I say - I've never once had to reboot my Mac for any preference changes to have an affect. So this isn't a Mojave thing that I've ever come across. My other machine is still running Mojave, so I can test this if you have a procedure you can write that requires a reboot...? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JakobP Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 In my users Caches folder I found this com.apple.logic10 folder which I deleted, I could then get to the new user popup window without restarting the mac. No special procedure, simply delete the com.apple.logic10.plist file and start Logic, and all preferences are still there. Delete the plist and the cache folder and you're welcomed as a new user. That's how it behaves here Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
des99 Posted September 25, 2022 Share Posted September 25, 2022 (edited) Cool I'll give it a try... I know these things are cached for performance reasons, and the mechanisms of cache invalidation can be complex, so perhaps in some cases your cache doesn't get invalidated, or mine does. I notice the CS prefs are not cached in this way, just Logic's main prefs. Anyway, I'll give it shot on myjave machine... bear with me... Edit: So, quick test results. If I move my prefs file to the desktop, and run Logic, it still loads the prefs as before (probably from the cache). *See note below. I wanted to actually delete the pref file though (without losing them), so I zipped up the copy on the desktop, then deleted the pref file and emptied the bin, then re-ran Logic (you'll note there was no reboot step). Logic has reset the preferences, and I get the new user workflow/dialog. I'd guess the process of actually trashing the pref file was enough to invalidate the cache. *Note: macOS does have a method of keeping track of open files when moved - an example being you can start a download, and while the file is still downloading, actually move it, and the file will still continue to download in it's new location. So it's possible this mechanism (whether it's linked to the cached prefs of not) is what helps the system still keep track of the file when moved (or at least, doesn't invalidate the cache as it still has handles on the pref file that was moved). Not sure, and it's just a thought - I don't know enough of how these things are architected under the hood to know for sure. Anyway, no reboot required here to trash the prefs, Mojave or otherwise. Just a good hard trashing is required... ☺️ Edited September 25, 2022 by des99 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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