EXS 24 Logic Sampler Users Group

david ricard wrote:
 > in the audio configuration window, with the hand tool you can hold down
> option (mac) and copy plug-ins to other tracks and their values remain
> intact- DR

Yeah - but this is only working inside one song. Plus, you can't copy send
settings.

The main drawback in Logic is working with various songs deriving from the
same recording session.
Just compare that to good ol' analog recording: You'd usually setup some
drummix on the first channels of your mixer and keep it *almost* the same
all throughout your mixing sessions. The same might be true for basses,
generic guitars and maybe even the main vocals.
In a *worst* scenario you may have 10-15 tracks (if not more), each with EQ,
compressor and eventually some further FX such as a deesser or so.
Now try to copy such a thing from one song to the next... you'll instantly
know the meaning of PITA. Eventually you'd even better be off staring
anything from scratch for each song - but let's not forget that using, say,
the same drum and bass sounds all throughout a production is some sort of
guarantee for consistency or whatever.
I just had to do this for some demos I was mixing recently, and it was
simply driving me nuts!
At first I saved all plugin settings in the first finished song to some
temporary plugin settings folder. Then I did a screenshot of my mixer and
placed it as the wallpaper of my second monitor - oh my god, what are we
dealing with, a program from electronic stoneage?!? -, then loaded the
target song, loaded the appropriate plugins, loaded the appropriate plugin
settings, adjusted the mixer manually, allways comparing my
screenshot/wallpaper.
Uhm!!!
Fortunately those demos were audio only, so in the end I stopped all that
bullshit (that's the only word I can find for such a procedure) and pasted
all audio regions of the new song into the allready mixed one. Not much fun
either, but still faster. But impossible on a more complexed scenario using
audio, "real" MIDI and virtual instruments.

With SX anything described above would be moot. It simply takes 30 seconds
to select and save the channels you'd like to copy - no matter whether
they're audio, group, bus or VSTi channels. Takes 5 seconds to load them
into any target song. Yes please!

Hendrik Jan Veenstra wrote:
> Depends on the kind of music you make probably.

Oh well, of course, just as usual...

> Personally I
> wouldn't have the need for such a feature.  And if I did, I simply
> would set up a song with 16 EXS instances, all preloaded with the
> proper instruments, and save that as a template.

Yeah - I am actually doing that. But it doesn't exactly help (at least for
me). When I start with an idea, I usually simply don't know what I will end
up with. So, I might start with a rock guitar riff and end up with some
rather electronic stuff. In that case it'd just be too cool to load in a
bunch of synth (maybe audio as well) tracks, allready containing a well
sorted roundup of my favourite sounds for such a thing.

> Now _that's_ something for which there is no workaround...  Now we're
> on the subject: I'd like to have mixer-snapshots.  Click on button-1,
> and the mixer is all set up one way, click on button-2, and all the
> faders move to another position, etc.
> That way you could easily compare different settings (is that bass
> too loud or not?), or have snapshots for solo-ing specific instrument
> groups.  Etc.  I'm not sure, and don't want to sound like an
> armchair-programmer, but I can't imagine  this being that difficult.
> After all Logic already _knows_ all the positions of all the buttons
> and sliders, right? (as witnessed by the fact that starting
> automation on a new parameter will create a node at the proper value
> at the beginning of the track).

Snapshots are quite another thing that would be *highly* useful. And I'm
with you on that one, I can't believe that this would be something too hard
to implement.

Btw, talking about things being difficult to implement - due to the
"non-dynamic" object based nature of audio/virtual instrument tracks I could
imagine that implementing an option to copy mixer channels (at least groups
of them) would be a tough thing. As Cubase isn't object based but assigns
its tracks in a somewhat "dynamic" fashion (i.e., you don't need to create
objects) this can be done easier it seems.
When I was thinking about all that I thought it'd at least be a good thing
being able to "manually" copy audio objects from one song to another (or
using the environments import function) - but let's just assume "git01" of
your target song is running with object setting "track 01" - might just
conflict with the one you're importing... one of the drawbacks of Logic's
object based conception.

Ah well... I'm not even in the mood to think about that any longer, I've
been requesting such feature(s) for SO long and SO often (along with other
people), but nothing ever happened. Even worse, environment import in
general still seems to be screwed up in a lot of ways.

Cheers,
Sascha