I’ve been spending a lot of time in Logic Pro, Apple’s music production software, recently. It’s a wonderful, powerful program with some odd ways of doing things, and one of those odd things is driving me bloody insane. If anybody knows the solution I’d be delighted to hear it.

It’s a drag and drop thing. When I move something in the arrange window or trim it, it snaps into place – so for example if I drag to the beginning of a bar, it snaps to the beginning of the bar.

Except when it doesn’t.

It looks like it’s snapped, but when you zoom in again and again and again it’s snapped slightly to the right of the marker, enough to send it noticeably out of time.

The same problem affects loops, so I set the edge to what should be the end of a bar, but it’s snapping slightly to the left or right, throwing the loop out of time.

Here’s an exaggerated image showing what happens:

 

The black line to the left of the vocals is the beginning of the bar, the bit where I drag/trim to, but on some tracks Logic won’t let me: unless I go to insane zoom levels, it moves to the left or to the right of the line, but won’t let me move or trim to the line.

I’ve clicked pretty much everything, including the “snap” options (“smart”, “bar”, “beat”, “ticks” and so on), and nothing seems to work.

It only affects some songs, and I can’t for the life of me see any differences between the ones that work properly and the ones that don’t.

Am I missing something really obvious?