This latest Logic Pro X update doesn’t have a heap of new items – it’s mostly just (always welcome) bug fixes plus a few subtle but quite powerful tweaks.
SOUND LIBRARY RELOCATION
Probably the biggest yet simplest one is the ability to move Logic’s huuuuge Sound Library elsewhere. You’ll still need some space on your main drive as it caches the downloads before moving them. This must be one of the biggest demands from users over recent years, what with shrinking drive sizes on laptops (expensive SSDs mainly) and the ever-expanding Sound Library. I just looked and it’s currently about 57GB with all the legacy stuff included.
SMART TEMPO ENHANCEMENTS
The most complex addition is probably the bunch of new features in Smart Tempo. Now you can detect tempo across multi-track audio files – no doubt very handy for importing full studio recording projects from elsewhere. You can even select which files will be analysed for the resulting tempo calculation. The (newly-renamed) Smart Tempo editor allows you to edit each individual audio track detection or a combined down-mix file.
You can also analyse and edit Logic’s tempo and time signatures based on MIDI regions that weren’t played to a click track.
Plus it looks like there’s also some extra options on the Project Settings/Smart Tempo pane that allow auto creation of edit groups on import and some options for exporting tempo.
AUX SEND ENHANCEMENTS
For those that do a lot of recording and mixing in Logic – Apple have added some awesome Aux-send capabilities.
Firstly, the ability to directly create an aux send to an output without having to go through a bus. This is perfect for creating headphone sends.
You can even use a menu command to match the channel-strip’s current fader and pan positions to the send – again a fairly normal way of starting off a headphone mix. On a related note – you can now have an independent pan for each send. Again this is perfect for headphone sends, but also useful when sending to stereo effects where you want to go into one specific side. You could always control this to some extent by making the aux send post-pan, but this would just follow the channel-strip pan. The actual control of the new Independent Pan can only be done when you enable the mixer’s new Sends to Faders mode. There’s a new button/selector at the top of the mixer just for this.
What this mode also does is make the Channel Fader control the selected Aux Send, and the Channel Pan control the selected Aux Send pan.
This means a couple of things; You can now use the Fader (or a connected control surface fader) to control an Aux send level accurately, and with the panning you can do cool stuff like pan the Channel strip left and the the Aux Send right and potentially get some fancy stereo stuff going on. I just tried it with Step FX and it was quite cool.
ALCHEMY HOTSPOTS
As usual, Alchemy got some more love this time around. You can now drag audio files directly onto a Sources panel and each contains hotspots for Additive, Granular, Spectral and Sampler import.
So all in all some cool stuff. See the Release Notes for the full picture.