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Logic issues. 1) Relative volume automation not working as it should & 2) takes but no comping.
2 complaints in one post, hope some of you can pitch in.
Unless I’m being dumb as a rock, relative volume (+-) automation is pretty much useless on Logic iPad and doesn’t work like it should and does on desktop. See the screenshot
Relative volume automation means “add or subtract x” from current volume. I’ve always used this in desktop to set the relative volumes in a track. Which parts are louder or quieter, etc… Forvthis to be useful the relative volume is added/subtracted from the fader volume, so you can set the “default” track volume and affect all the track. But it doesn’t work. Fader moves when reaching relative point +0db. Note, I haven’t input any automation data on Volume lane, just Volume+- (relative).
Take folders and comping… This is a half-baked feature, albeit a very important one. I searched and clicked and was very disappointed to find out there’s no “swipe comping”, or any comping, really. You can only choose a take. Plus if you slice a región to be able to manually comp, you can’t extend the region, which is very odd. Hope this is updated soon because it’s very much needed at home.
Comments
Agree with the missing comping features. It’s really sorely missed.
More info on Relative volume failure…
Here’s Rel vol automation, just a single point at -3db. The rest is the default 0db…
Here’s the absolute volume lane, with no points or data…
Some I set the volume fader at -18db, it stays like that until it gets to the rel volume point set at -3db. You’d expect the volume to go from -18db to -21db. Right?. Hell no, it goes up!. And even crazier it goes up to a seemingly random 11.4 db. Wtf? If I set the volume to -40db when it gets to that point, it again goes to -11.4db.
So it’s not relative, but it’s not absolute either. I don’t understand what is happening, I can’t make sense of it. It seems like this was never tested, or is there anything weird about what I’m trying to do?.
For a final test, I add a simple gain plugin. If I automate the gain it should work exactly like relative volume…
And it does!. Except the fader doesn’t move, and the 0db mark is not in the handy middle. But this proves IMO that Relative volume is crazily badly implemented. So I’ll use the gain plugin for now. Sub-optimal. I find this baffling.
Man, im gonna stop or I’m gonna end up asking for a refund 🤦🏻😅
WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS?
There’s no logic or correlation between the gain plugin automation values and the reference ruler… OK, I see , they’ve made the ruler correspond to the middle of the gain knob. But the middle of the gain knob is at -36db… Terrible and very misleading UI if you ask me… 0 = 0 would be a good starting point….
The vertical ruler is waveform amplitude it’s nothing to do with the automation.
You’re missing an important point here. Relative automation is an offset to existing automation. You need to write some absolute data first. In your example just write a single value of -18dB at the beginning of the track to set your desired initial fader value.
This makes sense to me. Just moving the fader isn’t automation unless you write it. That way you can make small tweaks to an already written and potentially complex volume automation with a controller which can be a real time saver.
If you don’t like this use the gain plug-in and automate that as you’ve already mentioned. That way it will always be relative to whatever you see on the fader.
I see your point but I don’t think I agree. Relative should be to the current volume, just like gain. I’m pretty sure on desktop it works that way. If I remember correctly on desktop it works just like the “db” parameter in the track inspector, which is exactly a Relative volume change. If there’s no existing automation for absolute volume, it creates a gray line (see screenshot above, where it’s at -18db) that’s just like automation. Relative value should take the dab value of that gray line just like it does with a yellow one, just like gain plugin and the “db” value on the inspector. The relative automation works, but it does it wrong, there’s no reason for that, just read the current value (gray line in absolute volume lane) and take it from there.
Waveform amplitude?. Measured in what?.
In volume and pan automation the zero at the ruler corresponds to 0db. As is the case for eq node gain, compression makeup and other values. If in relative volume the zero corresponds to zero db of gain (as it should). Why is it any different on the gain?. Don’t we agree that zero should always be zero?.
What’s actually happening is that the automation lane’s ruler (-100/100) is mapped to the relevant graphical element, without any conversion.
Since the gain knob’s zero value is not at 12 o’clock, the gain’s zero falls at some point above. The ruler could reflect the actual scale of the widget it’s controlling, displaying db’s or -100/100 depending on the case. Or make the gain widget have the zero at noon, or re-calculate where the zero is. It’s really not that hard. It may seem trivial but it’s annoying to have to blindly move a point to read the value in the little popup without any reference, specially cos your finger is in the way…
I do see your point about the ruler’s purpose not being automation. Forget the ruler, just make the middle always 0, have some correlation to the value and not the graphical knob or whatever.
Unfortunately on iOS, we don’t yet have the luxury of multiple competitive alternatives that do things in a way that may suit us better. I guess I’m just lucky that Logic is my first choice. There are lots of things I’d probably want to be done differently but I’ve long since just accepted I have to learn the logic way if I don’t want to get frustrated long term.
It’s just not worth my energy to fight it.
Hopefully you’ll be able to adapt without too much frustration. It’ll be quicker to adapt than to wait for a suitable alternative!
If I saw stuff like this on a project at my work I’d have it fixed, and it’s Apple were talking about…
Anyway it’s not a huge deal. I got frustrated because it was one of those “escalating” moments were you find a roadblock (volume relative automation), you find an alternative (gain plugin) and that too has some issues. Typical iOS daw stuff, but hey this was supposed to be “pro”.
Sure, it’s a great app. But it’s Apple, it should be better. Makes you appreciate and wonder and how @Michael can pull off a beast like Loopy single-handedly. I’m not kidding, you put Michael with someone like Paul from 4 pockets to build a daw and the 2 of them would get the thing done.
Thanks for listening! 🙌
Nice to learn about automation with the Gain plug-in. I personally prefer to do it that way anyway.
Not having the automation confirm to the same scale as the waveform makes perfect sense to me. I do think they way they present it is confusing, but letting the automation have its own scale let’s it adjust to the best presentation for the specific automation.
I do a lot of this type of ‘volume’ automation and have been using a gain plug-in as it definitely can’t be the fader. That would make mixing ridiculous.
Totally agree with you @tahiche … being able to use relative volume automation would be much better as it takes out the need for an extra plugin.
I think it was zenbeats that allows you to fade a clip in and out without affecting the track fader, just by dragging the clip handles up and down. I always miss this feature in other daws.
You can adjust the gain of a clip and create fade ins and outs without touching the fader or automate. In the (i) window on the left. You can even add cross fades between edits as well as tune the part up and down along with a bunch of other bits.
I’m not saying instead of automations for level edits, but there is a fair bit you can do in that window that comes in handy if you just want to adjust section volumes and fades etc.
But the relative volume works exactly as it should. It’s just you expected it to do something different.
If you think of it like this it should make logical sense: Say you add a relative volume ramp from 0DB to -3dB over a bar starting at bar 8 and have no other automation on that track or region.
Set the song position to 0 and the volume fader to -6.
Now play. Stop playback halfway through bar 8 and the fader now reads about -7.5.
Now set the song position back to 0. The relative volume automation at that point is 0 so -7.5 + 0 is -7.5. The fader is now -1.5 less than when you started.
Do the same again and stop the song halfway through bar 8 and the fader is now on -9. The volume fader had respected the automation completely the whole time as it’s just adding the volume to whatever the current fader is at.
Cycle bar 8 to 9 and every time it plays the volume continues to be reduced until it’s at -infinity as all you’re asking the automation to do is add a value to the current level of the fader. It has to be relative to something and being relative to the absolute volume automation removes any ambiguities. If you first write absolute volume automation and then you stop the song at any position in the timeline, the fader level will be the absolute level automation + the relative offset. So if you wrote a single automation point at the start of the song and set the fader to -6, stopping the transport halfway through bar 8 will always result in the volume being about -7.5. Go back to the beginning and the fader will jump back to -6 as the there’s an explicit command for it to do that.
Relative automation has to be relative to something and if it’s just relative to the fader then you will tie yourself up in knots very quickly as that will be a moving target.
Whereas if you automate the level of the gain plugin you’re always setting an absolute value — you’re not telling the gain to add 3dB you’re just telling the gain to be set to 3dB. That’s a huge logical distinction.
The waveform amplitude ruler is just a red herring. You don’t even see a ruler in the automation lane with MIDI tracks.
Oh nice! Thanks!
Leo (SoundForMore) did a video on that:
Thanks @R_2 . I find myself doing a lot of Google searches of the online documentation every time I have a question. The crossfade took me a little bit to find because it is not quite as directly intuitive as it is on the desktop. I found that DaVinci Resolve actually implement it nicely on the iPad by having the ability to drag on the corner of the clip. I thought I could do that with Logic, but unfortunately it’s more of a play with numbers on the side.
This is not true. Gain plugin is precisely relative gain. And it acts like Volume +- should. It adds or subtracts from the current value, be it an automation point or the value set by the track fader. That’s how it should work.
It’d be quicker if you just tried it out. Set track fader at -20db, add a gain plugin set to +3db, gain will not be +3db (absolute) but -17db. That’s what relative means and it’s a mistake, bug or oversight that relative volume doesn’t work exactly like that.
@Mountain_Hamlet thanks for the tip on the inspector gain, I use it all the time. Really useful for sequences but not really for “riding” volume on final stages of mixing. Again, it works just like the gain plugin and doesn’t need any automation on the Volume lane, just adds or subtracts from the current value. So there’s no technical impediment for relative volume to do what it should.
As for the ruler… Might be a silly idea, but. Could it be that Americans, not following the metric system, are more tolerant to values that don’t follow a linear scale?. I mean, if you think about it, the ruler looks like Celsius while the gain could be Fahrenheit 🤯. All I’m saying is if you thought of putting a ruler there, make it useful. I the case of the gain plugin, having Odb at noon, where it should, would take 10 minutes and then the zero would be at zero.
I know these issues are not a huge deal, but I can’t understand how you don’t see that they’re not well implemented.
@tahiche: volume controls rarely have unity gain at the midpoint. Just about any fader has it around 3/4 of the way between minimum and maximum. The knob you showed is consistent with that.
yay ad hominem 👏👏
But gain is relative, 0db on the gain module just means there’s no change in gain.
These 2 lanes do exactly the same. Seems like I’m the only one bothered by this.
@tahiche said:
All automation in Logic is absolute other than 2 parameters — volume relative +- and pan relative+-
Gain is the same as the volume slider so the overall level is volume + gain. So you can make relative changes to the volume but the automation itself is absolute. the semantics of this are important in this context as Logic uses the word ‘relative’ in the automation parameter in a different way.
Actually no. Well yes. Sort of. In a roundabout way which is easy to get confused about.
As any relative automation value is added to the Normal (absolute) volume automation value, it only works if there is automation data in the main (absolute) Volume automation lane. Otherwise Logic would just keep adding or subtracting with no baseline and things would quickly get ugly. So Logic makes sure there is always corresponding data in the absolute lane to prevent this situation. It does that by automatically writing a corresponding value to the (absolute) volume lane.
if you had the fader set to 0dB when you added the first automation point in the +- lane it would work exactly as you expected. However, if the volume fader was set to any other value, THAT is what logic would automatically write to the absolute volume automation lane.
So if your fader was at -8.3 that's what Logic would write to the absolute volume automation lane (assuming there was no automation already written).
So when you got to, say, -2.7 on the relative +- lane you would have ended up with -8.3 (absolute volume lane) + -2.7 (relative volume lane) = -11.0 dB! So for it to work how you expected you'd need to edit the Volume automation lane and re-set the value to 0.
That feature is why I think you experienced weirdness with the values in your second post. Logic wrote data to the volume lane which you weren't expecting, based on whatever the fader was set to at the time.
I realise I'm not doing a great job of explaining it.
I think this shows what I'm trying to explain. Look at the above. The automation of the ±volume lane shows -2.1 but the fader is at -12.1!
But this screenshot shows why:
When I expanded the volume lane you can see there's automation set to -10. That's because the volume fader was at -10 when I drew in the ±volume automation so that's what Logic wrote behind the scenes.
If I adjust the Volume lane to 0 this is what happens:
The fader is now at -2.1 as 'expected'.
Hope this helps clear up what Logic is doing? :-)