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260 Chapter 5 The Environment
Environment Exchange
Overview
One of the main reasons for the Environment is to customize Logic to your MIDI studio.
This can present a problem when sharing songs with other musicians, or using
different studio setups. It also presents a problem when you return to older songs after
you’ve changed your studio. Logic offers several functions to make these transitions as
easy as possible.
Whenever you want to exchange Environments between songs, there is a source song
containing the desired Environment, and a destination song with an Environment that
you want to change. The destination Environment must be in memory, and must be
the active song (one of its windows must be active). The source song can also be in
memory or it can be a file on your hard drive (or any other media such as CD, Zip, and
so on).
If there are two songs in memory, Logic will assume the active song is the destination,
and the other song is the source. If there are more than two songs in memory, Logic
will assume the active song is the destination and the most recently active of the other
songs is the source. If there is only one song in memory, Logic will present an Open
dialog, allowing you to select the source song when importing an Environment.
Importing, Replacing, Swapping Environments
Importing Single-purpose Environments
A single-purpose Environment patch might be an editor for a specific piece of MIDI
equipment, an Environment for a single MIDI processing task such as a MIDI LFO, or a
complex arpeggiator/delay line configuration. If the Environment patch is contained on
a single layer, the simplest solution is to select Options > Import Environment > Layer,
and then select the desired layer in the dialog that appears. This layer and all of its
Objects will be inserted in the destination song, at the same layer position (the same
place in the Layer pop-up menu) as it occupied in the source song. Note that this
inserts a new layer into the destination song—its original layers will be shifted as
needed.
You can also move selections of Environment Objects (inclusive of cabling) between
songs by dragging or copy and pasting. This is made even simpler by first combining
the Objects into a macro.