Recording legacy outputs as audio (not midi) in Logic

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Nous
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Recording legacy outputs as audio (not midi) in Logic

Post by Nous »

Please apologise for my lack of knowledge here:

I currently use an M-AUDIO audiophile soundcard for driving my Legacy Analog Edition 2007 with a MacBookPro.

I want to record the results of my Legacy tweakings as audio (not midi) in Logic Express.

For some reason, Logic registers only the midi input, not the audio input even though I have both tracks (audio and MIDI) armed for recording.

I am stupid? Can somebody please help? It would be very much appreciated.

Thanks.
Daz
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Post by Daz »

Stupid ... no !! This catches out lots of folks using Logic at first.

Briefly ... you need to use the Bounce functionality in Logic to bounce the audio output of the Instrument Track to an audio file that you can then import to a normal audio track.

Googling for 'logic bounce instrument audio' will pull up all kinds of goodies like this :

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jsp ... 1&tstart=0

HTH,

Daz.
Nous
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Post by Nous »

thanks for your quick and helpful response.

Seems a bit of a shame (in terms of time taken) that I can't just record the Legacy output straight into Logic as audio (instead of going from MIDI - bounce - audio file - back to AUDIO in logic).

Nice one.
Daz
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Post by Daz »

Another option (kinda) is just to Freeze the Instrument track. That effectively records the output of the AU instrument to audio, and then plays back the audio rendition instead of AU output. Great for freeing up CPU time as you can imagine, and quick/easy to do.

As you say the bouncing thing is somewhat clumsy and you're first person to say that ;-) You could route the output of your instrument track to a bus or aux channel instead and then use that as the input to a record armed audio track instead.

2c,

Daz.
Nous
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Joined: Thu Feb 26, 2009 7:23 pm

Post by Nous »

Thanks and sorry for my lack of knowledge in this area, I basically use logic as a multi-track audio recorder and therefore knowledge regarding the true (and potentially extensive) capabilities of logic is limited.

I will check out your suggestions in due course.

In the interim I have connected the output of the soundcard into my mixing desk and connected the output of my mixing desk back into the audiophile soundcard. This now works perfectly fine for recording the audio from the legacy instruments real time, but I am confused as to why this has worked?
Nous
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Post by Nous »

Sorry Daz, just realised that I inadvertedly carried out your final suggestion, and it worked, so thanks!!!

Can't help thinking that I am losing quality this way...but, I am happy nonetheless, many thanks.
Daz
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Post by Daz »

Strictly speaking you didn't quite do it the way I was suggesting ;-) Very close though, your thinking was right. Effectively you used an external wire to do this, but there is an internal virtual wire (as it were) you can use instead.

There are two problems with doing it using the external wire technique :

1) Degradation of quality : the pristine digital audio generated by Legacy left your computer and was converted to analog, it then travelled down a wire potentially exposing itself to yucky things like noise/interference, and then it was converted back from analog to digital by your audio interface. These days cables and digital/analog conversion are very good, so you might not actually hear any decrease in quality, but it is happening and that might be exposed later in the mix. It's not a showstopper, but it's good to think about anyway.

2) By sending the audio from the software out through your audio interface and back, you may have actually shifted it slightly in time due to the latency caused by your audio interface. You might find that if you play your recorded audio alongside the instrument playing itself, there is a slight phasing effect or worse depending on your configuration. I believe the recording software might account for the latency, but I am not 100% sure if that is always the case and with all versions of Logic for example. If you do experience that just shift the audio track in time using the Delay option that audio tracks have in Logic.

Anyway, when you get a chance explore the idea of using an Aux channel. You should be able to create one of those and assign it as the output of your virtual instrument track and the input of an audio track and do just what you did before albeit without the external loopback on your audio interface.

Bounce, whilst clumsy, does at least keep everything in digital domain.

More information than you probably wanted ;-)

Daz.
Nous
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Joined: Thu Feb 26, 2009 7:23 pm

Post by Nous »

no such thing as too much information!
thanks so much, I will experiment and return, if need be.
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