Clarification on Environment & Audio Objects

[djane]

If anyone has a good description of the Environment Window & AO's in layman's terms, I'd love it if you could point me in that direction!

 

I've been using Logic Pro 7 Power as a reference and just finished setting up my autoload track. The use of Audio Objects is a bit confusing to me. Do I need to create and Audio Object in the Environment for every Audio Track, a Midi Object for every Midi Track and a ReWire Object for every ReWire Track I create in my arrange mixer? Does not having the Object affect the use of the Track?

 

Any help would be appreciated, and thanks for taking it easy on the newbie

 

Bob

[ski]

Logic has lots of different "objects", but let's just talk about Audio Objects for now...

 

Audio Object -- a generic term for any the following:

 

• Audio Tracks (or channels, just like on a mixing board)

• Outputs and Busses (also directly analagous to mixing boards)

• Auxes (a special type of audio routing device, similar to a buss)

• Audio Instruments (which are used to host instrument pluggies)

 

For comparison, take a look at ProTools. When you open its mixer page you see a mixer. Those mixer channels do only one thing -- they act as any channel would on a normal mixing board. You could say that the graphic of PT's mixer's channel 1 is an "object" that had a dedicated, fixed function. Same with all the rest of the channels. But Logic works a little differently... there are no dedicated audio channels, outputs, busses, auxes, or instruments. Instead, every one of those things starts as a generic "audio object" and you make that object whatever you want it to be: track, output, buss, audio instrument, etc.

 

So let's say you had a totally blank environment and you added a single generic audio object. It's now up to you to decide what you want it to be... Channel? Buss? Output (mono or stereo)? Audio Instrument?

 

You establish what kind of function it will have by next accessing the (not-to-appropriately named) "channel" parameter and selecting from the list of channels, busses, outputs, instruments, etc.

 

Let's say you chose "Track 1" for this object. Voila! You have now created the first channel for your mixer! If you assign Track 1 to a track in your Arrange window, you can now record/playback from it as you'd expect.

 

But now you need more tracks. So keeping with this example of starting out with a totally blank environment, you could now create a new (generic) audio object and assign it to "Track 2". And so on.

 

Same goes for audio instruments, busses, outputs, etc.

 

The good thing is that a lot of this work is done for you automatically when you run Logic's Setup Assistant.

 

So in summary, anything that handles audio in one way or another in Logic started out a generic audio object and was then assigned an audio function of some kind.

 

Now, let's say you're working on a song and you need one more track. Or one more audio instrument. Or an extra buss. You can create these in the environment in one of two ways: either manually using several different metnods (one of which was described above), or, for creating additional tracks, instruments, and in some cases auxes, use the "create multiple" function in the Arrange window.

 

HTH.

 

-=sKi=-