You'd think that Apple would have implemented this higher internal (10bit) resolution for automation tracks when drawing and editing. Saying that, as soon as you edit the automation data via you mouse your back to 128 steps! Doh! On the other hand if you have a Mackie Control surface you actually get 1024 steps as the controllers faders output at 10bit resolution not 8bit like MIDI. The last byte being the parameter value which only has a resolution of 128 steps!

So why is this? Well as far as I can make out (and there's not a lot of documentation on this subject!) any automation inputted via the arrange page is transmitted to the plugin as a 'MIDI' Fader message which is only three Bytes of data. Now that's a pretty extreme example but it's going to suck if you want to create a custom LFO for your Phaser plugin parameter using automation! Your browser does not support the audio tag. If you don't believe me here's an example of Logic's Phaser plugin having it's 'Sweep Floor' parameter automated with a linear transition over three bars from top to bottom.

This leads to a number of problems, one major one being 'Stepping' on some plugin parameters. Yeah, right!Įver tried to input a value for Volume data on an automation track and had the value snap to something else not quite what you want? Well the sad fact is as soon as you draw an automation node in Logic the range of your automation parameter values are quantized to 128 steps! For everything! 'Logic can't have any flaws, it's the best! It runs on a Mac and it's made by Apple!'. Now I'm a big Logic fan but it has one major bug bear for me when it comes to automation, and that's Resolution.īut 'Toby', I hear you cry. Limitations! That doesn't sound good does it. The data is always MIDI based and fed to the object regardless from the track! It really doesn't matter where this data is, be it inside a track region or on the automation track itself.

Automation logic pro x