Music • Sound • Video • Art

This may be old news for many, but it was a bit of a revelation for me so let me share it.

Logic’s channel strip pan is a bit of a funny beast. Instead of actually panning the signal from one side to the other, it lowers the volume of one side to create the impression of panning. The problem with this is that you start to lose the imaging information of the channel you are panning away from. So at full pan left for instance, you lose any info from the right side. For example, if you are working with an orchestral recording of a string section of 14 players, the players may be distributed 5R, 1C, 8L. So with the default LOGIC panner at full pan left, you are actually only hearing part of the one player in the center (1C), and the eight players on the left (8L). All of the players on the right (5R) have disappeared. Your 14 piece string section is now reduced to 8.5 instruments in effect.

This obviously isn’t what happens in real life. If those 14 players were to get up and move to the left side of the stage, you would still hear 14 string players. And even though they are all sitting on the left, it is likely not the EXTREME left and you’d still have some right channel info.

In other DAWs, the default behavior is to increasingly fold the channel information from one side into the other as you pan from one side to the other. That way you still have both channels of information, but the pan setting better represents the positioning in space. (I imagine at extremes these two signals sum to a true mono so if you have phase problems, you’ll find out pretty quickly.)

Fortunately in LOGIC there is an answer. It’s a plug-in called the “Direction Mixer”. You can use this plugin to decode middle and side audio recordings or to spread the stereo base of a left/right recording and set the pan position.

So in the little spare time I have between work, preparing to move, and trying to finish a w-a-a-a-y overdue track with Tetramorph, I’m trying to prepare for an upgrade to Snow Leopard. Essentially this means checking lists to see if any key apps are incompatible, trolling for updates, and generally “tidying up” before upgrading.

Somewhere during those travels, Alchemy decided to stop working. Just “pffft!” Anytime I launched Logic or LIVE, BAM! instant crash out of the program and to the desktop. This had not happened before. I thought maybe it was the LOGIC9 install. (Nope. As it turns out, it happened in LOGIC8 too.) I updated to the latest version of Alchemy (a Release Candidate at that), but the same thing happened. I trashed preferences, rebuilt permissions, etc. Zilch. No luck.

So I searched online. Were others having this issue? It seemed not. Nary a peep of problems with LOGIC or LIVE. So I headed over to CamelAudio’s forum site over at KVR. I posted a question on the forum asking for help at 5:46 pm. 20 minutes later, Andy from CamelAudio responded with some suggestions. These didn’t work, so we went back and forth a bit. He suggested I send to him some log files, screenshots, etc. By 7:21 pm, he had located the issue and suggested a fix. For anyone who may be in the same boat, here is Andy’s response.

Hi, 

Thanks for the files, I can see what the problem is now and although   
we will need to modify Alchemy so it doesn’t crash under these   
circumstances, it’s an easy problem to fix. 

The crash occurs because of the entries in the config file that are   
using an outdated method of telling Alchemy where to find the data on   
a non-system disk.  The latest version of the installer allows the   
user to specify any location, but only the first time you install   
Alchemy but there is an easy workaround … 

PLEASE NOTE: the following instructions assume an alias is pointing to   
the Alchemy data folder on an a non-system disk.  If this is not the   
case DO NOT delete the Alchemy folder because it contains all of your   
presets and samples.  With that precaution out of the way … 

1.  Delete the following alias: 

/Library/Application Support/Camel Audio/Alchemy 

2.  Run the Alchemy installer again 

3.  After clicking through to install the main component on the system   
disk, you will be prompted for the location of the Alchemy data 

4.  Browse to the folder containing the data, which from your config   
file is here: 

/Volumes/SoundSets/Alchemy/ 

5.  Click through and let the installer finish 

Once that’s done, a new alias will be created that points to the   
Alchemy data and the config file will contain the correct entries for   
Alchemy to load properly.  Please check Logic and Live to confirm this   
is the case. 

… and then let me know!  

Peace, 
Andy, 
Camel Audio Support 

=============================== 
Camel Audio Support,  Support 
Camel Audio  - http://www.camelaudio.com
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This was a great experience, and helps to cement my loyalty and that intangible thing known as ‘good will’ as in…

“This [insert future product here] is intriguing … Hey it’s from CamelAudio. It’s probably pretty damn cool. I think I’ll give it a whirl…I KNOW THEY WILL STAND BEHIND IT.”

These guys really rock.

Last year on my page ‘Tools’ I said:

“I use Logic and Live for composition. I used to use Digital Performer a lot. I’m still a big fan and love the workflow and interface…but Logic and Live seem to be more “sympatico” with each other…Don’t know; I really go back and forth between Logic and DP. Currently, the pendulum has swung to Logic. Check back in six months…”

Well, it took a little longer than 6 months, but I’m definitely back in the DP camp. Especially with the release of DP6. There’s an awful lot to like about it:

• The new user interface updates the look of DP 6 and makes things a bit more sensible . And that’s a good thing. Unfortunately it is REALLY BRIGHT and if you have a couple of monitors and the room is dark, you need sunglasses. This redesign has been a big source of consternation over at MotuNation. Hopefully MOTU will offer some color customization options.
• Track comping that goes beyond that offered in LOGIC.
• MasterWorks Leveler plug-in and the ProVerb convolution plug-in. The Leveler is modeled on the Teletronix™ LA-2A optical leveling amplifier. Folks who know what that sounds like (I don’t), swear by Leveler’s accurate reproduction of that unit. As to the reverb, it sounds very nice to my ears and it allows you to adjust parameters in real time without pauses for recalculation. Sweet. Altiverb is pushed down on my list of things to buy for a little while.
• Final Cut Pro integration and film scoring enhancements. This WILL be important to me one day, so I list it here.
• Enhanced plug-in operation & softsynth operation. As I understand it, DP6 renders VSTI tracks when the application is idle. It’s sort of like automatic track freezing with out all of the administrative headaches. Theoretically, DP can render this stuff when not doing anything else and have it ready to go when it’s needed. In reality, this causes issues with Kontakt and other samplers reloading samples unnecessarily, and other weird behaviors. Seems like most folks are turning this option off. (DP6 DOES finally have a plug-in manager though so you can dynamically load different sets of plug-ins without relauncing the program. Sweet.)
• Direct audio CD burning for replication or archiving.

Note however that DP6 is a “.0″ release so has some definite bug-type issues for some users. For me it’s been a smooth upgrade, and I have not had very many issues at all. (You can head over to MotuNation to get a run down on the good, the bad, and the ugly with the release.) But my set-ups/templates/songs/projects tend to be fairly simple compared to some of the pros over at MotuNation.

FWIW, here are a couple of things that seem to help.

1) Rebuild your templates if possible. When people have had problems, it seems like they are trying to work with old pre-DP6 song files and templates. The two times DP6 crashed on me, I was working on an old DP 5.1.3 project file. Rebuilding that song in a new ‘from scratch’ DP6 file increased stability significantly. (Easy to do…unless the old template is something with dozens of stems, loads of chunks, and multiple sequences in the file. Then it must be a PITA.)

2) Trash all of your preferences (except for customized key bindings and the like) before installing DP6.