Plaidophile

So I upgraded to Logic 9, and have finally had a chance to use it for a new project from scratch. I like how keyboard focus is now finally indicated on the screen, so I don't have to click on the element I want to manipulate every time just to be sure it's going to go to the right thing (which was a major problem with 8 and negated much of the point to keyboard shortcuts to begin with), but on the minus side they completely screwed up the way comps work.

It used to be that if you recorded audio to a track which already had audio on it, it would add the new recording to the comp, and would make the newest part take precedence. Each individual portion of the comp would appear separately, and the merged comp would show up in the track itself.

Now, what happens is that as soon as you edit a comp, the next take you record ends up starting a whole new comp, with nothing else in it, and it hides the takes from the previous comps. Plus, the comp itself gets its own virtual track, which gets very confusing very fast.

The other major new thing about Logic 9 is Flex Timing Mode, which lets you do fine-grained timing adjustment of a take. On its own it works pretty well (although like automation you need to remember to set "anchor" edits on either end of the region you're working on or else it will mess with the rest of the timeline — which is something automation appears to do automatically now, sometimes), but when combined with comps it gets pretty weird. The comp-track shows all the transients and lets you drag them around there, but the actual edited transients only display on the original referenced region. Sometimes.

Also, Logic 9 is the most crash-happy version of Logic I've ever seen. 7 was kind of bad, 8 was rock solid, 9 is horrible. At least when 9 crashes I don't lose any data (unlike with 7 when the automatic crash save would sometimes corrupt a bunch of stuff) but it's really aggravating to have to keep on restarting it. I'm not even doing anything particularly complex, either.

I'm also less than pleased with how many of the built-in plugins have somewhat different behavior than they did before. Some of my old songs sound very different because Sculpture's parameters behave differently, and even something as basic as the compressor now has a bunch of new stuff in it (different response models and such) and not everything maps cleanly.

Basically, I really hope they release a version 9.0.1 or something soon, because I can't imagine anyone who uses this stuff professionally being able to put up with it.

Also it is absolutely aggravating how Logic now feels it appropriate/necessary to steal my focus from other apps when it finishes an operation that I was doing in the background. DAMNIT APPLE. I thought you guys understood!