Project Saving Management

[Tony65]

Hi All,

          can anyone assist/advise the best solution to doing the below?

The band I play with uses a Mackie DL32 32 way mixer driven by software/iPad one good feature is you can also record gigs by hooking in an hard drive to capture all 32 channels as wave audio. These get saved in some packaged file that when you drag into Logic automatically separates into 32 x different Logic channels.

So far so good, now these takes are a set length (not figured out how to change that yet) so over the length of a gig I ended up with 23 x seperate takes, which when dragging into Logic gave me 736 separate audio takes. No problem (if not time consuming) to zoom right in and line up the ends and starts of each snippet to keep cohesion in sound and to annoying little blips. Next, after lining all up OK the band only uses 18 tracks on the 32 for the gig, so I delete the unused tracks with no sound down to the 18. After that to avoid any silly button / mouse errors, join up each track (so 18 x 23) this bouncing is slow but OK to walk away from and come back in however long. Now I have 18 very long continuous audio of the whole gig. This is where gets confusing for me.

When I now save the project It is saving to disc 36 separate audio tracks where I only have 18? So the deleted tracks unused and 4 others are ghosting somewhere in the background file packaging for this project?

Moving on, I now want to go into the full gig and separate individual songs for working on in a separate project, smaller where I can add all my digital magic to tidy things up a bit etc. I open a new blank file, With scissor tool cut a start and end across all 18 tracks, copy the small sections of the song and copy/paste into the new empty project. All good. But, when I come to save this new project, again it takes an eternity as it's saving 36 audio tracks from somewhere? Have the ghost tracks followed with the cut and paste? This isn't stopping me working on the individual songs and bouncing down to an mp3 to share, but is taking a really long time saving and loading. A continuous cavalry of blue lines loading under the tool bar. I'm also worried I may be saving way too much audio data in disc space. As an example the full gig project (2 hrs+) is saving at 70Gb, a 4 minute song project 25Gb.

I've uploaded how I save (its probably default Logic as I don't know the pros and cons of package Vs Folder for me).

Anyone spot anything I'm doing glaringly wrong in this process?

PS the Mackie saves at 48 samples, is it best to change project to meet or audio down to 44 standard Logic?

Thx

Tony

 

[des99]

4 hours ago, Tony65 said:

Next, after lining all up OK the band only uses 18 tracks on the 32 for the gig, so I delete the unused tracks with no sound down to the 18.

By delete, do you mean delete the tracks in the main window?

All the audio files you've imported are still referenced in the project, regardless of whether they are used in the main arrangement.

4 hours ago, Tony65 said:

After that to avoid any silly button / mouse errors, join up each track (so 18 x 23) this bouncing is slow but OK to walk away from and come back in however long.

You could just pack them into a folder, then you've got one item to move, and no bouncing or new audio files to deal with.

4 hours ago, Tony65 said:

Now I have 18 very long continuous audio of the whole gig.

Ok, so you've now *added* another 18 audio file references to the project, so your project contains all the original audio files, and the new ones you've made by bouncing.

4 hours ago, Tony65 said:

When I now save the project It is saving to disc 36 separate audio tracks where I only have 18?

Sure - all the audio files the project uses will be copied to the project folder/package.

If you don't want the original audio, you'll need to remove the unused ones, or ones you don't want anymore, from the project audio window, so the project just references the 18 new bounces you made.

Remember, there is a distinction between the files you've imported into the project, versus which ones are actually currently in the arrange window. If you import 100 audio files, but only put one in the arrange window, the project still refers to those 100 audio file assets, unless you remove them from the *project*, not the arrange window.

The Project Audio window is where you manage the audio files referenced in the project, and has a bunch of tools to do things like "delete unused audio" (ie, delete audio file references that aren't used in the arrange page) and other useful management things. Be careful before you delete stuff that you didn't mean to delete, though!

For the last point - keep the Logic project at the sample rate of your audio - 48KHz.

[Tony65]

Thanks Des99, good information and I'm looking at sorting the wheat from the chaff in the base raw project to only the 18 audio tracks I want. Following on where I know want to dissect this full gig into songs in other smaller projects, what is the most economic way to do this? At the moment if I scissor out a section of audio (start/end of song) then copy from base project and paste into a brand new project, will just the section move over or will the full 2+ hrs of audio move too?

Thanks

Tony

[des99]

39 minutes ago, Tony65 said:

At the moment if I scissor out a section of audio (start/end of song) then copy from base project and paste into a brand new project, will just the section move over or will the full 2+ hrs of audio move too?

Firstly, I don't recommend copy/pasting between projects as having multiple projects open in Logic has a high chance of corrupting them, so avoid that where possible.

But if you copy/paste a region into a new project, then the audio file that that region uses (think of a region like a little "window" onto the actual audio file) will be added to the new project.

Better still is to create a new project and either import the track/s you want from the old project into it, then only the required audio files will be used in the new project.