undo makes song huge and causes strange problems

"I have a big song, about 1 hour long, more than 2000 tempochanges, just midi, no plugins, 1.7 MB if I deleate the undo-history."

hi, i break into a sweat just trying to image anything like the above working in logic on ANY mac.
i don't think logic was really designed to do this, at least the logic we all use, atm.
if i were doing dance tracks all the time - most of them seem to be very long -
i'd investigate other DAWs.

another annoying trait is the lack of accuracy when attempting to do micro editing at high zoom levels in the arrange.
lucky i've got ProTools, as well.

sorry i can't help more.
(you could try cutting up the song into 5min segments with some overlap, as this i find works for me)
best, david r.

Stephan,

I'm sorry to see that you're suffering from this situation. You have a corrupt song. If you want some suggestions for how to combat the time signature disappearance problem, do a search for "time && signature" and my username, iSchwartz. You'll find lots of posts on this subject.

If I have time later I'll write back with some suggestions.

E D I T E D...

Stephan,

I agree with DR9. Logic isn't designed (well enough) to handle a 2 hour song/score as you're describing. Are you writing a symphony or a movie score?

When it comes to scoring, I recommend keeping each individual cue as a separate song file. It's not always convenient to do this, but to give you an example, I'm working on a 25-minute short film right now. There are 25 cues and 20 minutes of music. I didn't take my own advice and I started to write it in one Logic song. Well, the song became corrupt after the first 5 minute's worth of music. I managed to fix the file. It took hours to do.

Then I broke up the score into about 15 separate songs. Of course, this is inconvenient also, because I had to re-create all kinds of things in each song file... bus sends, reverb assignments, EQ's, etc. But at the end of the day, if one of those files become corrupted, it won't affect the other 14. This is my safety factor.

Now... for a song that's 2 hours long as you say, with 2000 tempo changes, 2G of RAM isn't enough, IMO. When you say "lots of it is unused", how do you gauge that? I don't believe this can be the case, because Logic is reporting "memory is getting tight". For a song as long as yours I think it's better to have more RAM so that Logic can "stretch out" into that RAM.

Next... how to save a corrupted song? Well, there are many things that can become corrupted. Some of the symptoms include:

• events that you didn't record mysteriously appear that begin at negative bar numbers. This usually include automation data, time and key signatures, markers, tempo events
• time signatures, global symbols like repeat signs, double bars, etc. and markers will disappear after UNDO 1x
• UNDO 1x also results in multiple previous edits of notes, velocities, marker entry, etc. becoming undone

How to save your song? It's difficult to recommend precisely what to do because I can't see your file. But start with these steps:

1. Remove all markers

2. Remove all global symbols such as multiple rests, double bar lines, etc.

3. Empty the trash, re-organize memory, re-empty the trash

4. Copy your tempo window's contents and paste them into a new song. If you have negative tempo events, DO NOT SELECT THEM.

5. Return to the original song. Select ALL in the arrange window, copy, and paste into your new song. Note that this will not carry your automation data over to the new song. There are several methods for doing this, but if your automation data is corrupt (events at negative bars) it's not going to be easy to do this. If you really need to do this, post back.

6. From this point forward, when working in your re-constructed song, do not enter multiple rests or double barlines anywhere in the score until you are finished with all sequencing and editing. When it comes to adding these markings, add them last in a copy of your finished song file(s).

7. Start from the beginning and re-enter your time signatures (it may be possible to copy the global time signature track from your original song and paste it into your new song, but it is risky. You may end up corrupting your new song this way because this function is buggy).

8. Save along the way. Try not to do any editing other than re-entering time signatures. When you're done, save your song, close, and re-open the song.

Set your UNDO level to no more than 30 or so until you get more RAM.

Sorry, it's 5 AM and I'm losing my concentration. But that's what I recommend doing to save your current song in the meantime.

NOTE: I have edited the above post because it was unclear. If you've already read it Stephan, please re-read. Thx.

Stephan,

Thanks for providing more details about your score. Yes, with thousands of notations it might be worth the effort to repair your song without transferring data to a new file. Still, if you want to transfer the data to a new song (which might be best, to start "fresh") I just figured out a workaround for "transferring" text styles from one song to another.

In this image you see three windows: score editor, text styles editor, and event editor. Note that I've created 3 new text styles, called "Italic", "Boxed", and "Large". Then I added 3 text notations to the score, where each word reflects the name of the text style I applied. In the event editor, you are seeing the actual word I added. Obviously, "This is Boxed", "This is Italics", and "This is Large" are the text, not the text style.



I copied this region and pasted it into a new song, and of course the text gets copied along with the notes, but not the text styles. Here's the workaround...

Open the text styles window in the new song, and, in this case, create 3 new text styles. Set each style to have the same parameters as the previous song (take a screen shot of the previous song's text editor for easy reference). It is important that you create the text styles in the exact order in which they appear in the original song. This is because internally, Logic gives each user-defined text style a number which becomes associated with each text event. So if you follow this procedure you will find that after you re-create your text styles in the new song, all of your copied text will appear correctly.

It doesn't matter what you actually name each text style. It is the order in which each style appears that counts. So, in this example, "Italics" is the first text style I created in the text editor. I could change its name to "ßcheis" if I wanted to and it won't matter. As long as it's in the first entry of user-created text styles, the style will be applied correctly.

Message was edited by: iSchwartz

There is only 2 GB space for ram in my MacBook
Pro...

What would you say would be the right programm to do
the job?

OK. Then the solution has to be to un-corrupt your song, if possible, either by painstaking repair attempts or copying the data to a fresh song. But again, I think that Logic might not be well-suited for a composition this large and complex. I can't say with 100% certainty, but it's possible.

I feel, Logic is very usefull if you start with an
improvisation. Maybe I have to change to finale at a
certain point of the process. What do you think?

It might make your life easier to xfer to Finale for final markup. I guess it will depend on how much more time you want to attempt working entirely within Logic, hoping that you can repair your song and that it won't become corrupt again.

It's possible in the matrix editor to see all notes of all sequences (regions) simultaneously:

• select a region in the Arr. window
• open the matrix editor and double-click on the background

If you want to see only selected sequences...

• select the regions in the Arr. window
• open the matrix editor
• double-click on the background
• (matrix menu) View > show selected sequences only

I'm not surprised that your song's file size became reduced when you merged sequences. I'm sure Logic has to keep data about all of the following for each sequence:

1. start position
2. end position
3. display mode (notes or hyperdraw; if hyperdraw=on it has to keep track of which parameter is displayed; score style; color, etc.)

So reducing the amount of this data will reduce your file size.

Regarding the increase in file size when you set undo=none, no, I'm not sure why that happens. But regarding the UNDO buffer...

There are certain kinds of events that won't show up in the undo buffer. These include the editing or adding of global symbols to your score.

Take the double barline -- a global symbol. If you open your undo history window and then add a double barline you will not see an entry generated for it; but open the Signature/Key Change List Editor (SKCLE) and you will it appear there.

Unlike the undo history window, the SKCLE editor does not always update in real-time. To see changes reflected there, you often have to close and then re-open the window.

If you add 3 double barlines in a row and hit undo, they all disappear simultaneously. But if you add 3 double barlines, then edit a note, and hit UNDO 1x, the note will revert to its original state. UNDO 1x more and the double barlines will remain! And in this case, if the SCKLE is open, you will see it update in real-time. And sometimes doing undo that second time might corrupt your song...

So it seems to that there might be two undo buffers -- one for non-global events and one for global events, but it's not possible to see a history of global events (other than those shown in the SKCLE) and the undo behavior between all of this edit information is very strange, inconsistent, buggy, and potentially song-corrupting.

I can't suggest one way or another what results you should expect with undo=none. I know that "none" isn't a true value, because you can still perform undo operations with "none" selected, with global events being the items that get undone...

It's a mess...