Thursday, July 9, 2009

Logic 8 - Audio Track Stop Playing When You Moved To Another Computer

I use two different Macs for my project. I have a "Studio" Laptop which I use to compose and record tracks. Once I am basically done with it, I move the project to my Desktop iMac. It is much more comfortable to make some tweaks and do the mix on a big desktop machine.

When you copy a project from one machine to another though you might run into a problem of an Audio track not playing another machine. This happens to happen to me just about every time very consistently! May be the fact that I have a KORG M3 EXB-FW Firewire interface driver on my laptop. But, I don't know.

This has puzzled me for a good 3~4 hours and finally I have figured out at least what to do to correct the situation (not necessarily perfectly fix it.) If you are reading this and know exactly the best way to fix this, I would like to know, but here is my version of how to prevent and fix the issue.

Prevention -- Always Leave the Universal Track Mode On

Apparently this is important when you are moving project from one machine to another. So on all your projects, before you start them be sure to go to the Audio setup and be sure that the Universal Track is turned on and left being on.

How to Remedy If Your Audio Track Does Not Sound

  • First from the Arrange window know which Audio Track number is the one that does not sound.
  • Next, open the Environment window
  • Find the channel strip servicing the "dead" audio track.
  • Go to the left panel that where you are going to filled with it.
  • First check the Driver setting. This should correspond to the Audio driver that you are using on the second machine. Most likely Core Audio but you may have other devices.
  • Next try to assign this strip to another unused Audio track number. In my case just doing that make the sound to start feeding to the normal output channels.
  • If above does not work, click the Universal Track mode on/off, save the project, come back and turn it on/off again, save the project until you can turn it back on, and try the above steps. (I think there really is some bug in Logic along this line!)
OK, good luck and enjoy!