Logic Pro: phantom plugin playiing in saved audio file?

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Basically, I make music in Logic Pro and have third party plugins from kontakt/native instruments. I have recently finished a project and have saved it as an audio file. Most of it is fine but it is towards at the end of the song that I notice tremolo strings playing when it shouldn't. The puzzling thing is that when I listen to it in Logic Pro these phantom tremolo strings are NOT playing. There is no visible sign that they are in the note lane, in other words and yet they play in the saved audio file. It is very frustrating as I have spent days working on this and there is no way of fixing it because it is a strange problem that doesn't seem to have any answers.

Hopefully someone who uses Logic Pro and plugins from native instruments can help me with this? It would be much appreciated.

I've only got Logic 5 myself, and no kontakt or native instruments plugins, but:

1. A workaround might be to capture the audio in real time to get your mixdown. That way, what you hear in Logic should be what you get in your mixed-down file. Don't know if Logic still has that feature, I know they added what they called a Freeze feature as a quicker alternative to the old real time way of clicking the Bounce button in the Track Mixer which would then play the mix while it created the bounced-down file. It was pretty bulletproof. If that old feature isn't there any more, another good music program running at the same time could record the sound while Logic just plays the song.

2. Fishy things reminiscent of it, but not identical to it, sometimes happen in old Logic. I'd probably mess about muting whatever track I suspected of causing the problem, in the hope of isolating the culprit, then set that track up again from scratch and copy/paste the audio or MIDI data into the new track. But I'm not sure of the details of your issue and I could be miles out with that "tip." And you've probably already been hunting for the offending plug or channel to no avail. Trial-and-error like that must be very time-consuming as you aren't immediately hearing the problem but have to wait till it's created the mixdown and then listen to that.

3. If nobody else here uses Logic and all you can get here is my desperate ideas, isn't there a Logic Users' forum somewhere? There used to be, and it used to be good.

Sorry I can't be of more help, and I hope somebody here who has Logic Pro can step in and advise you better, if such a member exists.

Thanks for the reply.

I did post this on the Logic forums too and, like you, someone did get back to me and ask if I had saved it in real time or offline. I did both and it made no difference. When I save the audio file in real-time I don't hear the offending ghost instrument (tremolo strings). However, when I hear the actualy audio file it is always there. So annoying. It is indeed tiring and time consuming. The tragic thing is that it is at the end of the song and it isn't really a simple case of muting the plugin because I discovered that muting it in turn mutes the rest of the plugins that are dependent on that core plugin, if that makes sense? It means that if I mute it it also means muting some brass instruments that perform a decrescendo at the end.

This problem has happened before and the other workaround was the clumsy solution of breaking the track in two and sewing it back together and then saving it as an audio file again. That's the only way it seems to work. The only problem with that, however, is that there is always a slight 'gap' in between that you can visibly hear upon playback, unless you do a bit of blending it by putting the other saved audio file onto another channel to save it. So, yes, a very clumsy sort of workaround. I really want to get to the bottom of this though. Nothing more annoying than working on a project for a weeks only for it to do this. It's very difficult to explain these sorts of problems though.

I have heard that Logic support is not very good and it is causing people to move to other music software like Ableton, who apparently have better support.

I've just found that the culprit plugin was the stradivari violin. The problem was that the ghost string wasn't audible until now within the music project. Even for it to appear I had to listen to it all the way through to hear it in the project. Anyway, even though I now know what was causing it, I still don't know why it was happening.

Yes I think I understand the problem of "mute one, mute all," though it's disappointing they designed it like that.

Well, at least you know which plugin it was. Assuming you haven't completely cured it (and I suspect it'd be hard to trust it'll never come back in a future song even if you've fixed the current one), I suppose not using it gets rid of the problem, but that's a shame of course. Usually when I get a problem with a program / plugin / utility that defies all rational explanation, I get rid of it and find something else. Maybe there's an upgrade or downgrade version of it that doesn't do it? Still, unless it's a really great sound, I'd just use an alternative, as it sounds like very hard work to find a reliable fix. If you really like the sound, maybe you can resample it and create an EXS24 (or "Sampler" as they now call it) instrument from the samples? Might not give exactly the same result if it's got anything sophisticated about it though.

Hmm.......I'm guessing you did your realtime mixdown via Logic itself. If you get the problem the same way again (i.e. what you hear in Logic isn't what you get in the mixdown file), there's always the workaround of using a 3rd-party recording program for that step. Horrible solution but better than creating a big Logic song only to find there's no way of mixing it down perfectly.

Sounds like for all the upgrading and price increases they've done with Logic since they went Mac-only, it's still problematic. I expect some of its new bells and whistles are good, but clearly it still has bugs. Occasionally I've been tempted to move with the times, especially as the final Windows-compatible version of Logic (5.5) would run on anything younger than WinXP. But then one day I read that 5.2 runs on Win10 . Haven't confirmed that yet, but it does run on Win7. Logic 5 has a few bugs but they're mostly fairly "acceptable" and I've yet to find one as nasty as the one you found in Pro.

According to my notes, I tried the Ableton demo and liked it, though I didn't test it extensively. But one thing that keeps me preferring Logic is that it handles multiple takes in a way that suits me better than anything else I've ever tried. It's a long story though. Obviously support for Logic 5 is a joke these days, but it's always got me where I want to be.