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Logic Gotchas: Marquee Tool and Autopunch with Cycle Recording  [ Edit ] 

I’m not the world’s most thorough user of Logic by any means, so I don’t run into a lot of bugs or what I consider strange behaviors. I do have a couple I’ve found recently.

First, a small matter related to using the marquee tool (the one that looks like a plus sign or cross). I was trying to make a copy of part of an audio region with the marquee tool, following something I saw in an Apple video for Logic 7. What I had read was that you can option-drag a selection to copy that section as a new region, but it wasn’t working. To make this work, you have to switch back to the Pointer tool before option-dragging. This is true for any operation on a selection — the marquee tool will only change the area of selection, not the contents thereof. This makes sense given the way other applications work, but it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the video I watched, or in the manual.

Second, a bug (known issue, I suppose, more accurately) related to recording using the autopunch feature and cycle mode. Autopunch is Logic’s way of predefining where you want to do a “punch-in” or overdub, a section you want to re-record in a larger performance. The manual states that you can enabled autopunch and cycle mode at the same time to let Logic loop over, say, bars 4 through 10, but only record during bars 5 through 8. This is what that setup looks like in Logic’s time ruler:

To enable Autopunch, you can option-click the time ruler, click its button in the Transport. Either way, you’ll see the red region appear. If you only want to re-record a section of audio once, it works fine. The problem is this: it only works once. If you want to use cycle recording in combination with autopunch, you’re out of luck after the first pass. When the cycle ends, playback will continue from the start of the cycle region, but recording will be disabled. You just have to do it again manually. This is a known issue documented on Apple’s website, but I still filed feedback.

By the way, cycle recording with autopunch works fine for MIDI recording, it just doesn’t work for audio.

The workaround for this issue is just to use regular cycle recording, which does work as advertised. You’ll potentially end up with extra audio at the beginning and end of the region, which is a bummer, but if you need to redo a section over and over, it’s the way that will work.