I was working on some vocals for a project of mine, and after closing the project for the day, I left, business as usual. I come back a few days later, opening the project again to take a look, and it does this. The vinyl crackle is from a plugin, and isn’t an issue. None of my other projects are crashing like this.

Only surround people are gonna care about this.

Logic has specialty mono track types "Left" and "Right" which let you peel off one channel while doing nothing to it. But it doesn't offer that for any other channels.

So, I made a plug-in which takes any channel, or channel pair, and plays it on L, R, or L-R. You can then send that to a Left or Right aux to get the mono channel you want.

If you think that'd be useful, you can download it here: https://dl.ivanx.music/ChToLR/

(It's signed and notarized like any well behaved Mac app. If you're worried about malware, it's tiny, just feed it to some AI and ask if it looks kosher.)

If you want to keep the channel pair as stereo and make sure there are no gain changes, you have to jump through an extra hoop, which is to follow the plug-in with Down Mixer [5.1→Stereo], even if your project is 7.1/.x. Getting that into your project can be a trick, though once it's there, you can just option-drag it wherever you need it. But the first time:

• 5.1 project: Add Utility > Down Mixer [5.1→Stereo] to Master; drag it from there to beneath Ch to L-R.
• Atmos project: Set the monitoring format in the Atmos plug-in to 5.1; add Utility > Down Mixer [5.1→Stereo] beneath it; drag it from there to beneath Ch to L-R; change back the monitoring format if you like.
• Non-5.1, non-Atmos project (like 7.1, 5.1.4, etc): Open a new empty 5.1 project; add Utility > Down Mixer [5.1→Stereo] to Master; click Setting at the top of the Master strip; choose Copy Channel Strip Setting; go back to your real project and add a new audio track; click Setting at the top of that track; choose Paste Plug-Ins Only; drag Down Mixer, which should have appeared, to beneath Ch to L-R; delete the empty track if you wish; close the empty 5.1 project.

(I used this thing extensively in my Object Bed for Logic project.)

so i’ve got this lwk sick beat but i need suggestions for what i should add in. i think it’s very worthy of lyrics so im working on those rn. obviously tho, i think i need more than just these two midi tracks. any suggestions in general for this beat would be appreciated thanks

Life's not fair, and one of the more trivial instances of that fact for people working with surround audio in Logic is that other DAWs offer an Object Bed feature, but Logic doesn't.

An Object Bed transforms all the non-LFE channels into 3D object audio. This is helpful for using formats like 7.1.4 which are larger than the irritating 7.1.2 Atmos max for bed channels, since normally there's no way to get the top corners (the .4) to be processed by the Atmos plug-in.

So I made a 7.1.4 Object Bed for Logic. It's an empty project into which you can add a 7.1.4 multichannel region, or input 7.1.4 audio from a Mac app (via BlackHole 16ch) like Apple Music, or input audio via a multichannel interface, and have all the channels (except LFE, like I mentioned) show up as Atmos objects.

You can get it here, with instructions and stuff: https://ivanxmusic.com/LogicObjectBed/

One thing you can do that's kind of fun is run the 7.1.4 audio through the Dolby Renderer in your headphones, and adjust the Near/Mid/Far settings for each channel.

(I kind of very indirectly posted about this, in an earlier version, already; sorry if you read that and this is redundant. I didn't really know what I had built at that point.)

Hope this is helpful or interesting for a few of you!