Sure, I know what you’re thinking… “when would I have to do that!?!”
Well, that’s what I would have said until lately when this became an issue!
Right now, in the studio I am running a “samples only” slave machine without a monitor or keyboard, relying simply on Apple’s built-in screen sharing feature to help me manage Kontakt on that machine. All is going well until I decide to load another sample library onto the slave computer from some DVD-ROM’s I have and I run into this issue! Using the eject key on my main computer’s keyboard does NOT translate “through” screen sharing to mean “eject the SLAVE MACHINE’s optical drive”. Instead, it only ejects the master machine. Oops!
After some searching around, I found that a feature DOES exist to create what is shown in the screen shot above – a way to eject the optical drive tray from the menu bar!
To set this up, simply navigate on your system to:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/
There will be a file in there called “Eject.menu”
Simply double-click this and presto! You will have the option to click and eject! Enjoy!
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
I’m a definite believer in cleaning house in order to be more creative. For a composer, this means lots and lots of computer work. Perhaps its setting up backups, cleaning out files, installing a new PCIe card or hard drive, updating (all!) your software programs and sample libraries. Maybe calibrating your monitors. Whatever it is, eliminating the clutter is a great move towards improving focus during some downtime. Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
As many folks know, in the MIDI protocol, there is actually a particular control number for volume which is CC#11. However, in MIDI-speak this is called expression so as not to confuse anyone with the volume of a fader in a sequence. However, in order to add life to your arrangements, it is often very practical to embed this expression information within the recording in real-time and then use the volume faders of your sequence to “balance” things later on in mix-down.
For a lot of folks, this is a mind-numbing process of drawing various shapes in some sort of editor. For the luckier among us, our controller keyboard may have a port to plug in a continuous pedal of some kind. Or, our keyboard may have some moveable faders that are hard-coded to transmit certain MIDI signals. The question is: are any of these CC#11? And if not, how can you “re-purpose” one to do this?
Read more…
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
RA Play Edition
Ah, finally! Per Sweetwater’s handy NAMM summary, I just learned that EWQL will be releasing updated versions of both RA and Symphonic Choirs on the PLAY interface! For many of us who use Intel Macs now this is a HUGE deal as these libraries essentially STOPPED working (unless you transferred things to Kontakt 3, etc.). The new interfaces look very cool, especially the promise of WordBuilder being integrated INTO the plug-in and not a seperate application! Here’s hoping!
Blog Post, Logic Pro
On a recent project (see my last post) I ran into a situation where Logic Pro was literally stumbling and halting quite frequently giving me the standard (and far from helpful) “Logic is too slow error”.
However, I noticed that if I stopped and started it from the same spot many, many times it eventually played through just fine. How weird!
After much testing, I figured out what I believe the cause of this. This recent project had the following attributes to it:
- I was running on my Power Mac G5/2×1.8 Ghz with 2 GB RAM
- Most recent version of Logic Pro and Mac OS X 10.4.x
- The project had some very long “songs” which were film scores, ranging anywhere from 5-15+ minutes per “song”. (I have multiple “songs” that then made up the entire project
- The cues were all written in a classic “star trek” style, utilizing full orchestral sounds, though with sparse orchestration. Hence, I might have 40-60 exs24 instruments loaded up (many of them keyswitched samples from the likes of libraries like Vienna Symphonic Library (vsl) and Project SAM True Strike, etc.) so there was a significant amount of samples at my disposal.
- exs24 streams samples from disk, but also requires a certain amount of RAM per exs24 instrument (around 8-14 MB, depending on settings and such)
- I was using very limited “plug-ins” besides a reverb or two which was being powered off of a UAD-1 card (almost zero CPU hit) and was streaming the samples from a separted SATA RAID HDD, so bandwidth on that end should not be a problem
Blog Post, Logic Pro, Tips and Tricks
