Logic Pro 10.8.1 update released

[des99]

1 hour ago, HillbillyLifestyle said:

when I try to grab regions in the tracks area of the main window and move them back and forth in the main window, I frequently cannot place them where I want, because as I am dragging them around, the window itself is scrolling back and forth,

Do you mean when you drag regions to the edges of the window, indicating you want to move them beyond the current window bounds, so the window contents then scroll to accomodate the move? Or something else?

[analogika]

On 1/28/2024 at 2:38 AM, olavsu1 said:

for example, we always bring some extremes that no one actually uses, unless there are testers whose goal is to break the system.

I actually have a number of folders or files whose names contain question marks or "— >" marks for sorting. I've recently even (by accident) named a folder with a slash in the title and was surprised that it's apparently possible now on APFS. 

My post, remember, was aimed at your claim that: 

On 1/1/2024 at 2:09 AM, olavsu1 said:

operators are everywhere denied, in filenames.

which is simply completely untrue (as I proved).

Assuming that your existing directories can't contain operator characters sets you up for a world of hurt if you ever try to copy or move those directories to a differently formatted drive. It would certainly f*%@ me up nicely. 

[zipb]

I must say that I Iike version 10.8.1 under Ventura. Very little weirdness and/or crashes.

[HillbillyLifestyle]

On 1/28/2024 at 3:30 PM, des99 said:

Do you mean when you drag regions to the edges of the window, indicating you want to move them beyond the current window bounds, so the window contents then scroll to accomodate the move? Or something else?

Something else. It happens to me in the MIDDLE of the main window, for example, when I am attempting to manually-quantize recorded high-hat hits. I'm zoomed in far enough that I can align things perfectly, and I grab a region by the left edge, and I try to drag the left edge of the region in question VERY slightly to the left. But because the RIGHT hand edge of the region goes off the screen, even though I am attempting to align things in the MIDDLE of the window, the window scrolls all over the place, and the region gets dropped in some random spot I have no control over, not on the measure boundary I'm trying to drop it on. So I end up having to cut many regions up into very very small bits, so that the maddening auto-scroll does not occur. This means that I then have to spend perhaps 5 times as much time aligning high hat hits than is reasonable, because the auto-scroll keeps fighting me.

And do not get me started on the various flex and flex audio quantizing features. I gave up on that stuff years ago. I have spent literal hours watching youtube videos on how that stuff is supposed to work, experimenting with them, finding them to be quite difficult and unreliable and buggy. The various time-related flex time features are very much worse than doing things manually, to my mind. If you are in touch with QA staff on the Logic team at Apple, I'm happy to help them recreate this specific auto-scroll bug properly. I spent 30 years in testing and QA, for whatever that's worth, and some of these behaviors I'm describing are pretty subtle. /rant

Thanks for listening, and thanks for all your help! 

Edited January 30 by HillbillyLifestyle

[HillbillyLifestyle]

On 11/30/2023 at 3:01 PM, des99 said:

Some good fixes there - the Behringer XT colours, duplicated notes, MFX plugin issues, multiple region velocity thing and velocity compression thing, etc etc... 👍

The Behringer XT colors include a dark cobalt blue color (against a darker background) that is perfectly illegible unless I put my face right up on it. Very bad choice of default color. Is that configurable? 

Also, I am used to having to restart my Behringer XT several times before it and the Logic midi bus agree with one other. A new bug in 10.8.1 is that my routine of restarting the XT either does not work at all, or I have to allow the XT to sit there, turned off, while Logic sloooooowly figures out that the XT is not available. This bug alone is costing me something like 10 minutes per hour of recording and mixing time. 

OK, now a long-overdue rant. Man, I love Logic Pro, and I have since 2015. But my friends in recording are starting to ridicule me for sticking with Logic, and they are starting to wear me down. Even Reaper, God help me, is starting to look like an actual choice. 

As usual with recent Logic releases, 10.8.1 feels very much like four steps forward and three steps back. I cannot imagine what the Logic codebase looks like now, after so many feature-additions in just the last 4 years.

I truly have sympathy for the development teams responsible for getting the thing out the door in a timely manner. I also wonder what level of repeatable, automated test coverage that codebase has, whether the dev teams have discovered the many marvels of finely-grained automated testing, and how long the current Logic Pro compilation, build, testing, and staging deployment cycles now take. I bet you dollars to donuts that that cycle took a few minutes a few years ago, and now takes something like 3 hours. 

No development team can stay sane in such circumstances. If the Logic Pro dev team primary Supervisor is listening, I would be happy to hook him or her up with top-notch automated testing and deployment consultants I used to work with, who can work astonishing magic with 50-million line codebases of C++. (I would receive zero benefit, I do not wish to work in software anymore.)

I can tell you from bitter experience that once your compile-build-test-deployment cycle is greater than an hour, that codebase is essentially doomed, and you will be looking down the barrel of a multi-million-dollar greenfield project, unless you allocate serious time and money per sprint to refactoring. 

Dev Supervisor, whoever you are, you don't need the ulcers anymore. Tell your stakeholders and management the truth. Save yourself while you still can. Even the sophisticated code-rescue AIs we can expect around 2026 will struggle to fix the Logic codebase, because I'm guessing there are nowhere near enough exhaustive acceptance tests that an AI could work from. These AIs will be powerful, but they will NOT be able to work from existing complex codebase behaviors without EXACTLY replicating the bugs that you guys do know about and do NOT know about, and none of us may understand the code they generate. 

Your marketing stakeholders are only looking to add more features at any cost, and I understand; they are trying to keep Logic competitive in a fast-moving market. But they don't understand the risk they are incurring, just as former clients of mine at major car manufacturers, insurance companies, and health conglomerates did, because marketing and sales stakeholders do not understand the dangers of out-of-control gigantic codebases. I have seen really big companies abandon codebases utterly and spend 10s of millions of dollars on lengthy greenfield projects to try to recreate thousands of features. Now THAT is a great way to lose your entire customer base, because it takes years. 

I'm happily retired now, and I don't want a dime from anybody in software. But contact me and I will hook you up with the guys who literally wrote the books on legacy code, refactoring, automated testing, and continuous deployment. 

Working with an enormous, dying codebase is like alcoholism: the first step is to admit that your situation is unmanageable, and that you have lost all control. You're in a hole and you're still digging. Please stop digging. 

If anyone at Apple intends to contact me, I will only speak with development or testing executives, not anybody from sales or marketing. This is not a PR issue. It's a straight-up dev and testing and deployment issue.

Submitted with respect and sincere sympathy.

Edited January 30 by HillbillyLifestyle

[analogika]

9 hours ago, HillbillyLifestyle said:

If you are in touch with QA staff on the Logic team at Apple, I'm happy to help them recreate this specific auto-scroll bug properly. I spent 30 years in testing and QA, for whatever that's worth, and some of these behaviors I'm describing are pretty subtle. /rant

Thanks for listening, and thanks for all your help! 

That's not how it works. You submit feedback via the feedback form, and occasionally, the developers DO get in touch with you. 

[des99]

10 hours ago, HillbillyLifestyle said:

But because the RIGHT hand edge of the region goes off the screen, even though I am attempting to align things in the MIDDLE of the window, the window scrolls all over the place

Ok yes, so it sounds like you are hitting the "I'm going off screen, so scroll" behaviour. The best workaround I guess is probably to not zoom in so much, so your region isn't going off screen (or maybe shorten them etc)

[David Nahmani]

11 hours ago, HillbillyLifestyle said:

But because the RIGHT hand edge of the region goes off the screen, even though I am attempting to align things in the MIDDLE of the window, the window scrolls all over the place

The scrolling occurs when the mouse pointer goes off screen, not when the right edge of the region goes off screen. If your mouse pointer is close to the right edge of the region then you may not see the difference.

So if you're trying to align for example the beginning of the region, then click-hold the beginning of the region (or close to it) then drag. 

[rAC]

17 hours ago, HillbillyLifestyle said:

Also, I am used to having to restart my Behringer XT several times before it and the Logic midi bus agree with one other. A new bug in 10.8.1 is that my routine of restarting the XT either does not work at all, or I have to allow the XT to sit there, turned off, while Logic sloooooowly figures out that the XT is not available. This bug alone is costing me something like 10 minutes per hour of recording and mixing time. 

Interesting I’m turning my Behringer XT on and off whilst using Logic all the time and it doesn’t cause any issues at all - some seconds later I just get the message about changed number of MIDI ports. How are you connecting the BXT to your Mac?

[mattrixx]

On 1/29/2024 at 7:00 AM, des99 said:

Do you mean when you drag regions to the edges of the window, indicating you want to move them beyond the current window bounds, so the window contents then scroll to accomodate the move? Or something else?

I think I know what des99 is talking about. I experience this too. 

It's not about going to edges etc, it's like you have the region or note where you'd like it and you release the mouse and it jumps slightly off from where you wanted it. Drives me bonkers.

 

[ansolas]

16 hours ago, rAC said:

Interesting I’m turning my Behringer XT on and off whilst using Logic all the time and it doesn’t cause any issues at all - some seconds later I just get the message about changed number of MIDI ports. How are you connecting the BXT to your Mac?

same here and I have 2 extenders. in rare cases i have to re assingn the in/outs of one extender though.

[Stoobysnax]

Anyone else having these maddening issues in 10.8.1 (many been around a bit) with a Apple Silicon / Native logic...

- plugin GUI's do not open on insert (yes that setting is enabled). Some do, many don't. have to manually "re-click" on the plugin once inserted

- plugins take a lot longer to load than in the old intel days. like, I can feeeeeel them waiting to load up. couple second delay often

- periodic lags when using plugins. I think it's many dif companies, but for sure Fabfilter and UAD Spark ones... You drag a knob... freezes up for a couple seconds, then snaps back and jumps to where your mouse landed.

I've send feedback to logic a number of times. It's maddening. I'm on Ventura. it doesn't feel like this is an OS thing... Anyone on Sonoma that's not having these issues? (or anyone not having these issues in general)

I'd love to sort out what's causing this. Is it a logic thing. A UAD thing somehow. These issues seem to go away when using Rosetta mode.

[David Nahmani]

2 minutes ago, Stoobysnax said:

- plugin GUI's do not open on insert (yes that setting is enabled). Some do, many don't. have to manually "re-click" on the plugin once inserted

Yes, you're not alone. See this: 

4 minutes ago, Stoobysnax said:

- plugins take a lot longer to load than in the old intel days. like, I can feeeeeel them waiting to load up. couple second delay often

- periodic lags when using plugins. I think it's many dif companies, but for sure Fabfilter and UAD Spark ones... You drag a knob... freezes up for a couple seconds, then snaps back and jumps to where your mouse landed.

These I'm not aware of, I would recommend that you start new topics for each individual issues so that each one can be troubleshot in its own thread, you get more chances at getting them seen (and found through a search) that way. 

[ansolas]

9 minutes ago, Stoobysnax said:

- periodic lags when using plugins. I think it's many dif companies, but for sure Fabfilter and UAD Spark ones... You drag a knob... freezes up for a couple seconds, then snaps back and jumps to where your mouse landed.

see this: 

TL;DR: Disable autosave

To disable autosave, you may run the following in termial:

defaults write com.apple.logic10 DisableAutoSave YES

 

Edited February 9 by ansolas

[Stoobysnax]

3 minutes ago, ansolas said:

see this: 

TL;DR: Disable autosave

Well, I really dont' wanna turn off autosave as it's saved my ass many times. Shoot.

Why is this only an issue in Native mode, not rosetta? There's autosave in Rosetta too?

[ansolas]

4 minutes ago, Stoobysnax said:

Well, I really dont' wanna turn off autosave as it's saved my ass many times. Shoot.

Why is this only an issue in Native mode, not rosetta? There's autosave in Rosetta too?

You have the choice:

• manually hitting cmd S to save the project manually have have no lags.
• Accept the autosave and forget about manually saving.

Regarding Rosetta, I have no clue and I don't use it.

[des99]

1 hour ago, Stoobysnax said:

Why is this only an issue in Native mode, not rosetta?

Because plugins are hosted completely differently natively (outside of Logic, rather than inside of Logic on Intel), which is where the issue occurs.

[Stoobysnax]

18 minutes ago, des99 said:

Because plugins are hosted completely differently natively (outside of Logic, rather than inside of Logic on Intel), which is where the issue occurs.

ya that's annoying, hopefully they sort this out

[ansolas]

16 hours ago, des99 said:

Because plugins are hosted completely differently natively (outside of Logic, rather than inside of Logic on Intel), which is where the issue occurs.

Interesting!

Does this also have something to do with the fact that when a plugin crashes,
Logic continues to work and the recovery popup is displayed?

That separation seams to be a good and useful idea to keep Logic stable running even tho a PlugIn refuse its duties.

On earlier versions of Logic, that are not native ARM and Rosetta, this recover popup is not displayed and logic just crashes? 

Edited February 10 by ansolas

[des99]

55 minutes ago, ansolas said:

Does this also have something to do with the fact that when a plugin crashes,
Logic continues to work and the recovery popup is displayed?

Yep.

55 minutes ago, ansolas said:

That separation seams to be a good and useful idea to keep Logic stable running even tho a PlugIn refuse its duties.

That's exactly the point of it.

55 minutes ago, ansolas said:

On earlier versions of Logic, that are not native ARM and Rosetta, this recover popup is not displayed and logic just crashes? 

Running Intel code, the plugins are run directly in the host's codespace. If a plugin crashes, it takes down Logic.

With Logic running natively, plugins are run inside macOS's AUHostingService process (and Intel plugins in the corresponding AUHostingCompatibilityService, which is running in Rosetta), so if they crash, Logic is not affected.

[ansolas]

a lil' zoom glitch in DMD, the vertical zoom isnt working when fully horizontal zoomed out.
When Zoom horizontally just a tiny bit, the vertical zoom kicks in