Logic Pro version 9 has added a TON of features centered around audio editing, which makes this Sound Guy very happy.  Audio has always been the the stepchild in the Logic family, and for good reason.  Logic was originally designed to kick butt with Midi, and it truly does.  Don’t think Logic’s that great? Try writing an entire track in Midi in Pro Tools 6.

Anyway, Logic 9′s new audio capabilities make working in sessions that are primarily audio much, much easier.  In fact, I think Apples made great strides in making Logic into a better tool for sound engineers who bemoaned the lack of workflow-related features.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, let’s start with a simple function that has been sorely missed in previous iterations of Logic.  Bounce in Place.

Bouncing in Place basically means rendering a track or region within the current session.  This works a lot liks Pro Tools’s Audiosuite plugins with one major difference.  It allows you to apply all the track’s plugins and effects to the selected audio at once.  In older versions of Logic, this was like single track bouncing or bouncing the session with one track soloed.  Same result, except you had to go through the trouble of reimporting the rendered audio.

More After the Jump:

Example: One quick example for how this function might come in handy is actually a pretty common problem.  Collaborating with another artist, producer or engineer often results in the need to pass logic sessions back and forth between computers and studios.  Unfortunately we don’t all have the same sample libraries and third-party instruments, which can create problems when transferring to a new system.  Thankfully now, we can just select the tracks with samples or instruments that our colleagues lack and bounce those tracks in place.  Our original track is maintained, but muted, so when I pass on my session, my buddy can hear the track as I intended, despite his lack of my samples or instruments.

For starters I assigned some key commands to the two Bounce in Place functions – “Power Claw + B” for Bounce in Region in Place and “Shift + PowerClaw + B” for Bounce Track in Place. Here’s some pictures if you’d rather just navigate the menus in the arrange window.

The difference between the two functions is pretty straight forward.  Bounce Region in Place renders a selected region, leaving other regions on that track un-touched.  Bounce Track in Place renders the whole track, creating one, continuous audio file for the newly created track.

Once you’ve selected the audio files or tracks you want to bounce, you simple use your key commands or select from the menu to bring up the bounce in place options window.

They’re a little different, but the basic options remain the same.  You can decide whether or not to apply the effects plugins on the track to the region.  You can also decide what to do with the original track.  You can have the original deleted and replaced with the new audio (synced on the timeline).  You can also just have the original track or region muted – so that it’s still there and ready to go, but no longer playing.

You can also choose things like normalize (to prevent clipping) and effect tail to file/region with lets reverbs and delays on tracks ring out – this will extend the length of the rendered region too – so be careful if you’re rendering things that need tobe precisely looped.

After you OK it, you’ll get a new region placed with the same start time as the origina but on a new track.

Here’s a what a rendered audio file looks like.