[SOLVED] Pasting patch names into a MIDI instrument in an Environment results in extra spacing.

I encountered what I think is a bug (Apple support suggested it may be designed to work this way...whatever, it's a bug) when pasting patch names into a MIDI instrument in an Environment. Here's the scenario:

You have an external MIDI synth and want to have all of its patch names available to you from the patch name popup in a track. The defaults are all General MIDI patch names so they don't match your external gear's patch names. Back in the 90s with Studio Vision Pro it could just read your synth's patch names via SysEx commands and show them to you, but we've regressed some on legacy support so you now have to type them in when using Logic Pro X. (/end soapbox)

If your external synth is connected to a MIDI interface and is listed in your AudioMIDI Setup it should appear under MIDI Instruments within the Environment. To open the Environments window select it under the Window Menu.

Select MIDI Instr. from the Layer Dropdown on the left.

Find the synth you want to edit patch names. When you double-click its speaker icon it shows all the current patch names. When you select one it changes the patch on your external synth.

From here you start typing in all your patch names - typically between 64 and 128 of them, which can be time-consuming. Once done you think, "Hey! What if I lose these? I need to store them somewhere so I don't need to type them in again." Conveniently, there's a dropdown on the right sight of the Environment screen that says "Copy All Names." On my Roland JD-990 the last 64 patches are User patches for a data card I don't have so I wanted to label them all sequentially "User 1, User 2, etc." without having to type them all in and a spreadsheet is a quick way to do that. So I used the Copy All Names dropdown.

Great! Now you can copy them using the dropdown and you paste them into Excel or Number so they're all separated into different fields and safely stored outside of Logic Pro X. However, you can't just paste them back in using the "Paste All Names" dropdown because it places a space between all the names, throwing your patch names off by one. This is really messed up. The entire last 64 names are gone and after patch one, the names are all off.

I tried pasting them into Text Edit and converting it to Plain Text, but Logic still puts spaces in them.

SOLUTION:

1. Paste the patch name list into Pages. Turn on "Show Invisibles" from the View menu and it will show all the carriage return symbols.

1. Place a comma after only the first patch name (as shown in image)

1. Copy all in Pages
2. Go back to Logic Pro X and Paste All Names.

Your paste should work now. Just delete the comma in Logic after pasting.

Apple support told me the Copy All Names function was likely designed only for copying and pasting within Logic Pro X. That's really inefficient because if you lose your project for any reason, you have to type hundreds of patch names back in to get started again. Even stranger, if it's only for using in Logic Pro X, who has two of the exact same external synths with the exact same patch names on both anyway?

I hope this helps anyone out there struggling with the patch name situation on external synths. Most people are using much newer synths but for those using old ones, this will be a time saver.