Quote:
Originally Posted by oceantracks  If they are listening, I sure hope someone wakes up and gets the mixer together. It is unbelievable that you can't move tracks around in the mixer, and that when you put AUX tracks in automation mode they move around, as a reflection of them moving to the top of the Arrange Window. They at least need a pref that allows you to keep the mixer the way you have it.
TH |
Huh? Before you complain about something you might as well get to grips with how it actually works ... I've had plenty of things to complain about with Logic lately, but the mixer/arrange window relationship is not one of them - the way it works is actually quite genius and is one of the reasons I've preferred Logic for mixing ever since it's implementation of PDC on Auxes.
You in fact can move channels around in the mixer - you do this be rearranging the order in which they appear in the arrange page ... This assumes that you have the "arrange" view option selected in the mixer window - the "all" option will show you all of the audio objects available as determined by their presence and order in the Environment rather than just what you happen to be using in the arrange page at the time (Honestly there's not a whole lot of reason to even use this mode now that Bus/Aux creation and assignment is handled automatically.) You can also hide or show subsets i.e. Aux, Output, etc. in either view mode - there's also the new single view mode which some may find useful as it just shows you the Auxes and Outputs associated with the track that you've selected
in the arrange page - the same stuff that's accessible in the arrange window dual channel display.
In "arrange" view mode Auxes are treated in the exact same way as regular channels - just select "Create/Select Arrange Track" from the drop down menu when you control-click on the Aux to make it appear on the arrange page (I felt double clicking on it as was the pre-L8 behavior to be a quicker and more elegant means of accomplishing this - and I also think the new drop-down menus are usually redundant and/or useless, not least because they've forced the control-click elastic band behaviour to change ... but that's another story.)
Alternatively, and this is what seems to be tripping you up, is that you will also cause an Aux to appear in the arrange page if you put it into an Automation mode - this happens for what should be a perfectly obvious reason, as you won't be able to edit or manually enter automation for the Aux if there's not a lane in the arrange page to display it in.
Point is, however you got it to appear, you can now freely move the Aux to display in the arrange page, and the "arrange" view mixer, exactly where you want it. This is where the "genius" bit comes in - you can have your mixer display e.g. your snare followed by an Aux with a gate + trashy distortion on it, followed by an Aux with a dedicated snare verb/delay, etc. whatever, the sky's the limit. If on the other hand you want your Auxes to continue displaying at the far right of the mixer, simply put the first Aux you send to the arrange page at the bottom of the page - subsequent Auxes that you send over will appear underneath it ... alternatively just use the "All" mixer view mode for what it was designed for.
Really the only issues I see in L8 with how all of this works have to do with the fact that the dual channel display is forced, and often redundant, especially if you've arranged channels and Auxes in the arrange page as I've described (I believe I've already posted about this in detail elsewhere) it's actually quicker to use the up and down arrows to select between a channel and it's related Auxes while keeping the mouse hovering over the arrange channel fader in order to change the relative levels than to move between the two channels selecting which Aux you want to adjust by clicking on the Associated send, only to have the second fader switch back to displaying the output channel as soon as you touch the originating channel fader. Don't get me wrong, the new way of automatically creating and assigning Auxes can be very convenient, but the whole implementation overlooks another very powerful feature - i.e. the capability to route the same bus to the input of multiple Auxes - in order to make Mults make sense in the context of the new interface I've found it neccesary to use a new and different send/bus for every additional Aux for a given channel - not a huge inconvenience given the ease with which they can be created, but still ... bulky and inelegant - which (to me)
goes against the interface design philosophy that Logic has historically appeared to be based on. I would really like to see an option to resize the "Inspector" pane in order to get rid of the often redundant second channel display, and reclaim some arrange page real-estate
for editing. I honestly could give a rat's ass if that means fade parameters are partially obscured - I know where to find them, and it was never a problem in previous versions.
This is my fundamental complaint about the interface changes in L8 ... it really feels like it was designed by a team whose strength is in designing interfaces for visually-oriented applications ... what the fine folks at Apple need to remember, however, is that Logic is an
Audio Application, and it's visual component should reflect this fact. I want an interface that I can look
through, not
at. The "solid-object" look and feel really bothers me. Things like the metallic-silver color and subtle depth-cue shading of the transport bar, inspector and buttons as well as the totally unnecessary gradients on regions contribute to this impression, as well as the overall "indestructible" nature of the one window-interface ... the end result is I've frequently felt like smashing my monitor instead of making music - not a good thing obviously.
Standardization as a concept is great - I don't have a problem with brand consistency, but I do have a problem when "style" wins out over functionality and practicality, especially when it pretends to prioritize "functional design" as part of it's marketing shtick/branding. I've been seeing this happen more and more with Apple in general of late and I don't like it - quite frankly if there were a viable alternative to their hardware/software for what I do at this point, I'd use it ... and recommend it to everyone I know.
G.