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Automation Lanes.


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Automation Lanes...

 

1. I have 5 automation lanes. I have the main’ s track display off. Hitting triangle to unveil the 5 automations.

Logic instead decides to show only 4. I reassign all automation in their lanes, hit “A” to hide automation, hit “A” again to show automation (BTW…Logic could show ALL used automation on this track just with shortcut "A"...), hitting arrow (let’ s lose more time…) and again 4/5 automation are appearing. WHY on earth Logic NEVER keeps the last state in the automation lanes and always messes about?

 

2. Deleting all automation lanes to start fresh….I decide to use main’ s track to display first automation lane, hitting arrow to unfold the rest. All appear and in order. Not bad…Testing it once more, not bad, it works…THIS time (not always). Setting main track to “Display Off” and starting reassigning all lanes underneath to their corresponding automations again like the first time. Hiding automation, opening automation, again, only 4/5 are showing. WTF?

 

And this is an example...I have other projects with many tracks where I spend time cleaning a bit automation lanes etc. Why since ALWAYS Logic behaves like a...with automation lanes? When hitting “A” it would have been better to instantly show ALL automation lanes used in that track and in the ORDER left by the user - btw, you can drag and drop and change position of the lanes. What's the purpose since Logic will decide at the end of the day what to show and when!!! It’ s incredible that you work on automation, you hit “A”, you want 2 minutes later to re-edit, and the lane is gone, you need to again make a new lane and select the parameter to modify. Why?

 

I literally wanted to share this for at least 2 years now but didn’t (still don’t) know if I could be clear on where my problem is although I'm sure many of you can understand :P

 

Sorry for the attitude but that's most probably what I hate most about Logic. It's a pity for such a clean and easy in the eye GUI to mess it up like that...

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Frustrating indeed. I wonder if this behavior could be related to the main track's automation being set to Display: Off?

 

Hi David!

 

Unfortunately that's not the reason although one could conclude to this after seeing my problem in action...But trust me (I'm sure you've noticed) this has been bothering me many years in different occasions and it's something where Logic is weak and there is obvious room for improvement.

 

Btw, you might set main track to "Display Off" and sometimes when hitting "A" it will show Volume lane.

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  • 9 months later...

So, I'm not imagining this? There's no way to setup a particular view where I see just a few of the lanes of CC data - in my case, modulation and expression - and leave the rest of the controllers collapsed and then leave the automation view and come back and have this setup still in place? Instead, Logic starts from scratch and I have to set up my custom view again, and again and again? This seems silly. I even tried to make a screenset that had my preferred view and then lock the screenset to preserve that view. But, as soon as I use automation in another screenset and then go back to the regular view, the locked screenset also collapses everything and I have to start over. Is there a workaround for this or something I'm missing? An automation lane custom view seems like something a lot of users would want and I certainly expect the automation to open in the condition it was in when I last used it.

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I was hoping that maybe I missed something, but when I did a search and found this well-researched post, I had a bad feeling that this might be the way Logic actually handles multiple automation lanes. Since I'm using this multiple lane technique as a workaround for the fact that we can only have one controller showing in the piano roll at a time, I really want it to work. In fact, it does work, as long as I don't accidentally trigger automation mode in a different screenset and then try to exit automation mode. As long as I just leave one screenset with all the lanes arranged how I want them to be and leave automation alone everywhere else, the arrangement stays consistent, so it works pretty well as long as I stay away from that A key!

I just submitted a feature request over at Apple for user automation lane views. I'm even alright with letting them be part of a screenset, just as long as we can lock in an automation lane arrangement and keep it. I also requested that opening, closing and then re-opening the automation view keeps the lane arrangement as it was the last time I used automation mode. 

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Hmm. You're right. I actually got it to work once on a fresh project, but only once.

Here's what I did:

1. Open fresh project, add instrument, make a region and add 4 controllers in the piano roll.

2. Go to main window, turn on automation mode, select instrument track and change automation to region automation. Setup lanes so that only two of the four automation lanes are showing. (In the case of this first track, hitting the disclosure triangle at the bottom left of the track header only reveals one more lane. I have to keep adding lanes to see all four lanes. Odd. This is different than what happens on the other tracks I'm going to add later.)

3. Pressing A to open and close automation mode correctly shows the two lanes I last had visible.

But...

4. I setup a second instrument track and option-dragged the region I made in the first track to the second track. Again, I set the second track to region automation and arranged the same two automation lanes for viewing. (But, as I mentioned, this time when I hit the disclosure triangle, all of the controllers showed and I had to delete two of the lanes in order to have the two I wanted to view.)

5. Now, pressing A to open and close automation mode collapses the view to one lane and I lose the two lane view I had previously set up. I added more tracks to see if that changed anything, but this new behavior where the lane setup is always collapsed seems to be permanent on my computer.

Could you try this on your computer and see if adding tracks and regions makes the automation misbehave? Thanks for looking into this!

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Interestingly it behaves significantly different here, but still incorrectly:

1) in Step 2, I do see all 4 automation lanes after clicking the disclosure triangle, so I actually need to remove 2 lanes to have just 2 lanes left. Correct behaviour here.

2) In Step 5, I will end up with 4 (not one) automation lanes instead of the expected 2. This is definitely a bug

Did you already send a feedback report to Apple?

Edited by polanoid
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That's really weird that you have different behaviors than I do, but the end result is, neither one of us is getting the behavior we expect. I wasn't sure if this inability to customize the automation lane view was a bug or Apple never thought this feature through very well, so I sent them a feature request to allow us to make custom lane views that we could recall because I think it would be nice to have different lane views depending on the type of editing I want to do.

I should probably make a different thread for this next question, but what do you think about this other weird thing that happens when we make automation lanes where there are a bunch of duplications of the original track for every lane even when we leave automation mode? Why are those necessary or useful? I haven't been able to figure that out. Those extra lanes don't appear to do anything outside of automation mode. They just clutter things up and get in the way.

Thanks again @polanoid for taking the time to check this stuff out!

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