Slaved to Logic: Playback starts at odd positions?

void · 2014-07-02T15:44:31.000Z

Hey,

been trying to record into Logic, with AR slaved to Logic & using song mode…
when starting playback, the AR would start at the 3rd bar, in the middle of a 4bar pattern, dunno what’s going on there…

could this be something with Logic sending song pointer position or some voodoopoop along these lines…? or an AR bug?

jjj · 2014-07-02T18:36:57.000Z

Is Logic doing a 2 bar “Count in” before recording?
Maybe that’s throwing it off…

void · 2014-07-02T23:41:23.000Z

thx… checked this but nope…
it also happens on playback, without the count in.

it s a bit confusing… I first thought that the loop start point in logic would influence the start position on the AR, but not sure anymore…

triple-checked that transmission of song-position pointer in Logic was turned OFF, but this setting didn’t seem to have any effect…

moving the Logic start point around would change start position on the AR, but it was hard to predict where the AR would start… e.g. moving the start point one bar to the right did not necessarily start the AR 16 steps further… and changing pattern lengths on the AR would also change things up in weird ways…

gotta investigate further…

dimi3 · 2014-07-03T02:13:01.000Z

are you in song mode on the AR?

void · 2014-07-03T09:49:30.000Z

yeah… this happened with chain mode & song mode,
and first it appeared that the issue was with Logic sending that song position pointer, because changing the loop start in Logic was altering the start position in the chain on the AR (e.g. it would start at beat 2 of the 2nd pattern in the chain).

but then this also happened with normal pattern mode, and it was weird as fuck when the start point also changed when changing the pattern length on the AR (???)

pretty much impossible to line up chained patterns on the AR with the Logic project…

void · 2014-07-03T13:00:23.000Z

okay it seems like Logic X ALWAYS sends the position pointer when starting playback, and this can’t be disabled:
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13383

when the AR is receiving transport, it also listens to this pointer, and this too can’t be disabled.

In this particular case, we’re working with existing Logic projects and want to record AR audio for different segments within songs… there are some breaks & pauses etc., so using chain or song mode for individual segments would be the way to go.

But as we can’t always start from the first bar in Logic, but have e.g. a part that starts at bar 53, it makes the AR start from some weird offset, and it is “quite complicated” to create chains which line up nicely.

best would be to filter out song position pointer somehow… lol computorx

duplex · 2014-07-03T13:08:22.000Z

This may not be that helpful in solving your problem, but I have my AR slaved to Logic X and it works fine with the AR in song mode – always starts in the correct place. (Looping in Logic is another matter, but . . . ).

As for starting mid song, I usually put dummy MIDI objects on the AR track which are the same length as the patterns, then you can always make sure you’re starting at the beginning of an AR pattern.

Good luck with it, anyway.

void · 2014-07-03T13:17:45.000Z

thanks! yeah I figured using pseudo-empty (muted) placeholder patterns in the chain could work… but in this project, the existing arrangement is mostly guitar with occasional segment changes in unexpected places… seems like a lot of song-mode puzzle work to match the Logic timeline…

just found this:
http://www.subtlesoft.square7.net/MidiPipe.html
lets you filter MIDI messages… seems to work okay when filtering out the song-position pointer… AR now starts like you would hit play on the device… just what I wanted.