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PT Logic

Logic Pro New Control Surface Nightmare

paulnajar

paulnajar

Logician
Logic version
11.2.2
Mac OS
Sequoia 15.6.1
I've been running a SSL Nucleus alongside a Mackie C4 Pro & Nektar Panorama P6 for quite some years. Mostly very stable and all get along well. Seems like since 11.2.2 this whole area of performance has got a lot worse or broken..

I actually had a day of pro work yesterday where I had to completely go without any control surface support at all (never want to have to do that again) as all I could get happening is that Logic was passing CS midi messages into the recorder (physical input) and all the surfaces would do is trigger whatever midi device I had open.

So today with a bit of time I've trashed the CS Preferences, reinstalled the Panorama P6 and got it behaving normally, The SSL Nucleus (Mackie Control) is back behaving normally but the Mackie C4 will not come back. In Short the C4 problem seems to be that there is no controller feedback to write text on it's screens and/ or the handshake is not occurring to have logic isolate the MIDI IO from the general recording streams

I have tested the C4 with different cables, different MIDI interface and I even have a spare C4 Pro which I tested with it's own power supply and MIDI cables on a different interface but there was no change. So I think this rules out any hardware issues.

In Logic CS Setup I have for years kept Automatic Installation tuned off. When trying to troubleshoot all this I noticed it had been turned on. Did 11.2.2 do this??

When I delete all CS devices, quit Logic, delete CS preferences in User/ Preferences, relaunch Logic, the Auto Installation finds my Nektar P6 and Mackie C4 but the C4 display never get's any text display and Logic does not think the C4 is a Control Surface - which seems to be the main 2 symptons/ problems. If I then go and manually install the SSL Nucleus Left and Right that all works but the Mackie C4 display stays blank even though Logic finds it via "Automatic Installation" and moving C4 controls definitely sends data. If I then quit Logic I get a freeze on quit about 80% of the time. If I then relaunch Logic, the Mackie C4 has either disappeared from CS Setup or it's there, still without any screen text AND the SSL left has been turned into a Mackie C4 module. Crazy right?

FYI The Nektar Panorama connects via a USB port, the SSL Nucleus uses IP MIDI over my local network so only the Mackie C4 uses 5 pin MIDI usually connected to a pair of ports on my RME UFX 3.

Some of these odd behaviours have been intermittently hanging around for years, but nothing that a Rebuild Defaults has not been able to fix until now.

Any thoughts would much appreciated thanks.
 
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A quick update from me and it's good news (phew). I've managed to restore all functionality and it now seems stable again.

In a last ditch effort to prove it was not hardware related I hooked up the Mackie C4 to my M4 Mac mini which I mostly use as a live performing computer with Apple mainStage but it does have logic installed.

I hooked the C4 up to that machine and it instantly came to life as you would expect. I went back to my Mac Studio Ultra (my studio machine), and trashed all CS preferences and the standard Logic preferences as well. launched Logic and the C4 was instantly recognised and the whole system just started to work again completely.

So not completely clear about what the exact solution was but it presents like it was Logic's Preferences (not CS preferences) that somehow had some corruption causing the issues. I'm going to leave this here in case it helps someone down the line struggling with similar issues.

Kind regards
 
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Thanks for the solution Paul. I have a C4 as well as the SSL UF8 and UC1, all running on a Mac Studio M1 Ultra. All are fine. I'm tight on time just now, but if there is anything I can check by way of comparison, let me know, I'll get to it from Sunday on.

kind regards

Mark
 
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Just a bit more to report.

It seems that even when logic has automatic installation unchecked in Control Surface Setup, it still occasionally does stuff in the background that screws things up with control surfaces.

It is difficult to tell exactly what’s going on so my latest line of defence is once I have both Logic and logic cs pref behaving nicely I duplicate both those files in the user/ preferences folder and leave them there. When stuff goes wrong I simply delete both used prefs files and replace with the clean copy and it’s fixed very quickly.

My latest test is about which order the installed control surfaces sit in in the CS setup window. If things should settle down I’ll report back when some time has passed…
 
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I've been having intermittent problems with Mackie MCU Pro/XT/C4 Pro units for years...

Main issue(s) I see are: units do not connect when launching Logic. I have to power cycle for them to be recognized by Logic. Happens about 50% of the time when launching Logic.

Other problems: Mackie units will not display any information on their screens, even though buttons like 'select' work properly. C4 unit will not go into marker mode when pressing 'marker' button (actually, none of the assignment buttons seem to do anything in Logic Pro 12.2) Opening control surface setup will reset the track offset for each Mackie unit (I have MCU Pro and 3 XT units, so the Pro has a 24 track offset, unit next to it 16, etc ... these offsets get dorked up if I open the control surface setup page. Very infuriating)

I've trashed prefs and rebuilt, and in the past that seemed to work for a while, but so far no luck on 12.2 I have connected via both MIDI and USB, same issues regardless.

Mackie says this is an Apple issue... I suspect Apple would say it's a Mackie issue, sigh.... Just wondering if anyone else here has similar experiences and, better, a fix?

Thanks.

(Unrelated, but Logic Remote app on iOS only connects to my Mac Studio about half the time as well...)
 
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Yes I have again experienced weirdness since Tahoe 26.4.1 and/ or Logic 12.2 with my Nucleus and Mackie C4 Pro. This time the issue is both surfaces only work well when they are in the same CS group which is not my preference. I like C4 in its own CS group but when I do that the mode buttons on the Nucleus and C4 completely stop working. Only way I've found to get them both to behave is to have them in the same group.

I tried all the earlier stuff I mentioned in this thread like deleting all preferences but it's made no difference. It does seem like Apple have played around with something under the hood. Also I notice there is a dedicated MIDI 2.0 object in Audio Midi Setup that I think arrived with Tahoe 26.4 and wonder if this has got anything to do with the issues here.
 
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Update: Tossed prefs and added each unit back, one at a time, quitting Logic after each successful add. And Voila! Now things are working again. So far, this has held up for a week, ha ha. We shall see...
 
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Yes I've been able to get mine stable again also. I'm about 99% sure the issue was with the Nucleus and the IP MIDI extension it requires. It creates 6 ports (2 per program) and allows to switch between 3 open programs. So the other program for me is RME Totalmix which I noticed was not working properly with the Nuc as well. A simple toggle of midi control off/ on in totalmix restored normal operation there. A few minutes later I tried again to configure Logic with the 2 devices in separate groups and it all worked again also. Some weird corruption in the IP MIDI extension and/ or the Nucleus it seems.
 
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