February 2010

Drag Mode: Shuffle L

by Matt on February 22nd, 2010 in Editing

Have you ever noticed the Drag field at the top of the arrange window?  If the name doesn’t give it away, this option set what happens when you drag a region.  More specifically it determines what happens when you release the region after dragging.

The Shuffle L mode will cause the beginning of a dragged region to snap directly against the end of the region immediately to the left on the same track.  This drag mode is very handy when editing where you will be removing portions of the original audio file.  When you delete a section of audio, all of the regions that follow will shuffle left and snap against the end of any regions that preceded the deleted region.  Assuming your edits were good, you should have seamless playback across the edit point without having to drag or align any regions.

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Force Project Save on Application Hang

by Matt on February 7th, 2010 in Advanced

Application crashes are inevitable. They will happen at one time or other and seem to strike at the most inconvenient of times.  DAW apps can crash from bugs in their code or from bugs or issues with third party plugins.  Sometimes, Logic is smart enough to detect a crash and save the current project as a “Project (crashed).logic” file.  However, I have had Logic lock up but never completely crash on more than one occasion.

This happened to me today while working on a project.  I tried to change to a screenset with a 3rd party plugin window open while the project was looping.  Something caused Logic to lock up and display the spinning beach ball of death while the project continued to loop in the background.  I couldn’t stop playback, change screensets, or save the project.  I figured Logic would eventually crash and ask me to save, but 5 minutes later it was still going and I still couldn’t do anything.  I looked at the timestamp of my project file to see when I last saved.  Intstead of losing my last 10 minutes of work, I decided to figure out a way to make Logic crash and automatically dump the project.  Simply selecting “Force Quit” was not an option because it doesn’t tell Logic to dump the project before quitting.  After some quick testing on another machine, I found out that if you kill Logic via the terminal it will save the file as if it crashed as long as you send the correct kill signal.

Please note that this may not work in all situations.

Here’s how to do it.

  1. Open Terminal.
  2. Type ‘top’ and press enter.  You will see a window like the one below.
  3. Find the PID for Logic.  In the screenshot above the PID is 8070.  This number will change each time you launch Logic.
  4. Press ‘q’ to get out of top.
  5. Type the following command and press enter.  Remember to replace XXXX with the correct PID.

    6. kill -s ABRT XXXX

  6. Logic should tell you that it crashed and has saved the project for you.
  7. Hopefully, you can proceed to reopen Logic and load the (crashed).logic project file and hopefully recover your changes without Logic crashing again.

Performing the steps above will cause Logic to save a (crashed).logic project file even if it is not locked up.  So, feel free to try it on an empty project for practice.  That way you don’t mess it up if you have to use it on an important project!

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