the Quick Swipe Comping button doesn't appear

[Lynn David Newton]

Background:
o Running Logic 10.8.1 on an M2 Mini.
o I'm very familiar with music.
o I'm fairly new to Logic and DAWs in general.
o First post to this forum.

I have all advanced features enabled.

I created a project with a single MIDI instrument track.
It has multiple takes, and I want to use Quick Swipe Comping
to merge parts of the takes.

The Quick Swipe Comping button doesn't appear in my track header.
This is the symbol that looks like a dotted pyramid: /\

Therefore, I also don't see the Take Folder pop-up menu.

I don't get the "line" icon when I move the pointer inside a track.

These features are both seen on page 278 of the latest "Logic Pro User
Guide from Mac" obtained a few days ago from the Apple website.

I do see the Comping button when I download examples where it is enabled.

Surely there is merely something stupid I've overlooked. Two hours of
trying to solve the problem myself has left me only frustrated.

Can someone suggest what I'm failing to see?

Abundant thanks in advance to anyone who attempts to help me out.

[David Nahmani]

There's no quick swipe comping for MIDI take folders, only Audio take folders.

[Lynn David Newton]

Good grief! Well, that's obviously an explanation.

The tutorial I was following didn't make that clear. (Not a criticism. It's hard to cover everything in a piece of software as complex and featureful as Logic.)

So some other editing approach is obviously required for tracks where there are multiple takes of MIDI files. I have yet to learn what that is.

Thanks very much for the instant turnaround. You've made my day.

[David Nahmani]

Here's a workaround: 

[Lynn David Newton]

Good, I'll try the workaround. I anticipate I'll have a lot of this to deal with.

I sense the thinking is that one advantage of MIDI tracks is that they're easier to correct, e.g. just change notes and rhythms, so swipe comp is probably an unnecessary function.

[David Nahmani]

Just now, Lynn David Newton said:

swipe comp is probably an unnecessary function.

Well you're certainly not the first one who's trying to use it, so I'm sure that if they were to implement it (hopefully one day), a lot of users would use it. 

[Lynn David Newton]

Regrettably, this problem is not quite solved yet. Here is a variation.

I have a network of Macs in my home. My main computers are a Mac M2 Mini in my office and a MacBook Pro in my music studio. Project files are on a NAS network server, in a disk image (DMG sparseimage file) that I mount and unmount depending on where I'm working.

On my office system, I'm running Logic 10.8.1. In my studio, it's still at 10.7.9. (I didn't realize they aren't the same until today.) I doubt that the version makes a difference in this problem.

In my studio, I created a project with a single audio track with multiple takes. The Quick Swipe Comping button is there and I can now perform that function.

When I go to my office and load the same project, the Quick Swipe Comping button is not there, and I am not able to do swipe-comping.

All advanced features are enabled on both systems.

Is there another setting somewhere I have to tweak to allow this?

In my original report on this thread, I referred to a "line" icon. It's actually the pencil icon. Some person whose YouTube tutorial I was watching called it a line icon. And I see it now on the computer where comping works.
 

[polanoid]

Just for clarification, which button do you refer to when you write “Quick Swipe Comping button”? This one (which turns into a scissors symbol when clicked)  / ?

Edited February 1 by polanoid

[David Nahmani]

12 hours ago, Lynn David Newton said:

When I go to my office and load the same project, the Quick Swipe Comping button is not there, and I am not able to do swipe-comping.

All advanced features are enabled on both systems.

Could you share a screenshot of the take folder without the QSC button on that system? 

[Lynn David Newton]

Yes, that's the button that does not appear, and that's what the "official" manual calls it. I referred to it earlier as looking like an upside-down dotted pyramid: /\.

To summarize: The problem now is that it does appear on the system where I create the project, i.e. where I record an audio track, which is running Logic 10.7.9, and a few minutes later, when I move to my office and attempt to work with quick-swipe comping on it, where I'm running Logic 10.8.1 (I'm sure the version is irrelevant), the button does not appear.

Could it possibly matter that on my office system I do not have an actual audio interface attached? I'm not doing any further recording. All I'm interested in is manipulating the multiple takes on one track. (For didactic purposes, i.e. I'm still trying to learn how to do this.)

[David Nahmani]

1 minute ago, Lynn David Newton said:

Could it possibly matter that on my office system I do not have an actual audio interface attached?

No, that doesn't matter. 

Please do post a screenshot of the take folder on the system where it's not displayed. 

[Lynn David Newton]

Yes, I can attach a screen shot.

Good enough?

[David Nahmani]

Ok if you don't mind reverting to default factory settings I would trash Logic's plist file: 

1. Quit Logic.
2. Hold down Option as you click the Go menu in the Finder and choose Library.
3. Open the Preferences folder and trash com.apple.logic10.plist.
4. Restart your Mac.

Then make sure you re-enable the complete features. 

[Lynn David Newton]

Umm. OK, but won't this trash my other personal setup preferences?

I should be able to restore what I need without too much difficulty. I hope.

Here goes nuttin'

[David Nahmani]

14 minutes ago, Lynn David Newton said:

OK, but won't this trash my other personal setup preferences?

It will reset only the settings you've changed under Logic Pro > Settings. 

[Lynn David Newton]

I'm back. Voilà! Getting rid of the plist file definitely did fix it! The button is now present. Yay.

I used rm from a command line as superuser because I couldn't find it with Go.

(For reference, I've been a Unix/Linux guy since about 1983 but would rather do things the Mac way because ~/Library is a deep dark mystery and you can get burned monkeying around with files in that directory. If I could only clean it out, I'd probably be able to dump about 40 GB of stuff I no longer use and save the disk space.)

When I reboot any of my systems, it sometimes is a bit of a hassle to get things connected with my NAS again. When I first started Logic (i.e. just now), it asked me if I wanted to download more sound files. I've already got all there are (from Apple) and I've also relocated my sound library to the NAS. This tells me that when Logic first started it didn't know where to look for my sound library. However, I created a symbolic link in the usual expected place that points to its location on the NAS. It must not have connected yet.

However, I checked that link and made sure I could see everything (from a Terminal window) and when I started Logic again and opened my test project, it didn't complain about not having sound files. So I guess it's there.

And the missing button now appears where it's supposed to. I have no idea who that might have gotten out of sync.

Thanks once again for this excellent assistance.

Right, those were the settings I'm concerned about, but as it turns out I haven't customized a whole lot at this point. And I have good notes on what I've learned so far, so if I see something isn't right I should be able to track it down and reset it.

[David Nahmani]

7 minutes ago, Lynn David Newton said:

And the missing button now appears where it's supposed to. I have no idea who that might have gotten out of sync.

Looks like your preferences may have gotten corrupted and your complete features maybe weren't enabled even though the checkbox was checked in Logic's settings? 

Resetting your preferences shouldn't be too much of a hassle, generally as you're working if you find a behavior that you're not used to you go and set that preference as desired again. 

As for the sound library you may want to choose Logic Pro > Sound Library > Open Sound Library Manager and double-check that everything is installed and recognized by Logic? 

[polanoid]

Just now, David Nahmani said:

Looks like your preferences may have gotten corrupted and your complete features maybe weren't enabled even though the checkbox was checked in Logic's settings?

I know we're always very quick in blaming "corrupted" preferences (I still stand by my statement that there can't even be such a thing) but in this case it most probably was caused by a simple switch in the prefs, because the Take Folders look exactly like that if you have Quick Swipe and Take Editing Clock Zones switched on, which probably was the case (and no one can prove me wrong because the - non-corrupted - prefs file containing this setting is already gone for good).

[Lynn David Newton]

Some of the problem (for me) is remembering what all those features are and where they get set. In practice, I've customized very little in Logic at this point.

Good suggestion to check the Sound Library Manager. I did that and everything is there.

It was an interesting challenge a couple of weeks ago to get that set up on my remote server so that both of my systems that run Logic use the same sound library. Happily, the software seems to have done the right thing, so things are percolating along pretty well now.

Time to do other work. 

[David Nahmani]

7 minutes ago, polanoid said:

the Take Folders look exactly like that if you have Quick Swipe and Take Editing Clock Zones switched on

You're totally right, in fact disabling the complete features doesn't look exactly like the take folder we're seeing here, so my guess is that you are right on that one. 🙂