And it's still confusing (to me) when and where EXS saves edits done on the GUI or just the edits of the EXS edit window.
- Every EXS Instrument
can (but doesn't
have to) have a single set of front-panel GUI settings stored into it. If an EXS Instrument
does have settings stored into it, every time it's loaded these settings will get loaded into the front panel GUI settings.
Under the Options menu in the EXS front panel GUI, the first six commands are related to this functionality:
- "Recall Default EXS24 Settings" will wipe whatever's going on with the current front panel settings and replace them with a plain-jane set. This can be useful when dealing with Instruments converted via Chicken Systems Translator or imported from other sources (like SoundFonts or GigaSampler), which often results in garbled settings that produce no sound.
- "Recall Settings From Instrument" will wipe whatever's going on with the current front panel settings and replace them with whatever settings are stored with the Instrument file. This is useful if you've wrecked your carefully adjusted mod matrix or whatever and need to go back to what the Instrument has stored with it. This is basically the same as selecting a different Instrument and then going back to the current Instrument.
- "Save Settings To Instrument" will wipe whatever settings (if any) have been previously saved into the Instrument and replace them with the current state of the front panel GUI settings.
- "Delete Settings From Instrument" will wipe whatever settings (if any) have been previously saved into the Instrument and leave that Instrument "settings-less". If you do this, the next time you load that Instrument the front panel settings will remain at the state they were in from the previously-loaded Instrument. This means that a "settings-less" Instrument will "inherit" the settings of whatever Instrument was previously loaded. This can be very useful when you want to copy and paste settings from one "template" Instrument to other Instruments - use "Delete Settings" to strip off the stored settings from the destination Instruments, then load the desired template Instrument, and then load a desired destination Instrument and hit "Save Settings To Instrument". Now the destination Instrument has inherited the settings from the template Instrument and that status has been saved so that the next time the destination Instrument is loaded it will come up with the template's settings. This can be a quick way to roll through a batch of newly created (or imported) Instruments and force them all to have the settings from a desired template. I do this all the time. Roll through a batch of newly imported Instruments that have garbled settings from Translator, Delete Settings from all of them, then load a desired template Instrument with all of my fancy mod matrix settings, then for each of the newly imported and stripped Instruments, load the Instrument and Save Settings for each one. Boom. Now all of those newly imported Instruments have my template settings stored into their front panel and will load that way every time.
- "Copy Settings" and "Paste Settings" operate as expected. This lets you copy and paste settings from one Instrument to another. You can use this in a similar manner to the paragraph above, where you copy the settings from a desired template Instrument, and then paste them to the destination Instruments, remembering to Save Settings To Instrument for each one - otherwise those pasted settings will only be in effect in the current song, and only until you load another Instrument into that slot.
Note that all changes you make to the front panel settings
will be saved with the current Logic Project, even if you
do not use the "Save Settings To Instrument". This lets you make "this instance only" changes and not worry about messing up the saved settings that will be recalled whenever that Instrument is loaded. You can even load the same Instrument into multiple instances in the same Project, and make different changes to each instance, and it will all work as expected, without any of the settings from those multiple instances messing up the settings that are saved to the Instrument, and without the settings from one instance messing up other instances.
In essence, all EXS front panel settings are treated like any other "plugin settings", in that they are automatically snap-shotted and stored into the Project file without any further user action - the same way you don't have to use "Save Plugin Settings" for each eq and compressor plugin while you work - the Project just remembers them all and they come back the next time the Project is loaded. This means you can make various tweaks to ADSR, filter, and even complex mod matrix settings without needing to "Save Settings" or do anything else really - and you can do it separately for multiple instances of the same EXS Instrument within a single Project. It's perfect!
There's also a couple of other commands in the front-panel Options menu - "Rename Instrument..." and "Save Instrument As...". These will operate as expected on the Instrument file, allowing you to rename the current Instrument or Save a duplicate copy under another name. Whatever settings were most recently saved into the Instrument will be the ones that get copied to the newly-saved Instrument.
When it comes to changes made within the EXS Editor window, that's a little different. Now we're dealing with the sample map itself, separately from any of the front-panel settings stuff. In the Editor window, under the Instrument menu, there are the following commands:
- "New" will create a new EXS Instrument with a garbage temporary name, usually something like "Instrument #636". This will also be "loaded" into the EXS front panel, so you'll be able to hear it while you work on it, and it will inherit whatever front-panel settings were in the previously-loaded Instrument (if any). This means you will be working on your new sample map "within" whatever fancy filter and mod matrix settings were previously on the EXS front panel. Nice.
- "Open" will allow you to navigate to and open an EXS Instrument file directly from disc. Basically the same as loading that Instrument from the browser or EXS front panel pop-up and then hitting the Edit button.
- "Save" will save the current state of the maps within the EXS Editor back into the stored Instrument file on disc. I use this command so often that I have assigned a Key Command to it. If you close the EXS Editor window without using this command (or "Save As..." or "Export"), any changes you've made to your sample map
will be lost when another Instrument is loaded into that instance. I think (but I haven't verified) that any new edits are lost at the moment the Editor window is closed without Saving, but those edits may persist until another Instrument is loaded into that instance. So, if you're editing your sample map and you mess everything up, just close the Editor window and flick to another Instrument, and then back to your desired Instrument, and it will revert to the earlier saved state. Note that this "Save" command
only Saves the Instrument file itself - it
does not save, export, copy, or move any of the samples which that Instrument uses.
- "Rename" probably operates as expected - but I've never actually used it so I can't really say. I always duplicate and rename Instrument files directly in the Finder.
- "Export Sampler Instrument and Sample Files" is the big one. As expected, this will export the current edited state of the map displayed in the Editor window
and all of the samples that are referenced by that Instrument's current state to a new user-specified location. This will create a new folder with the same name as the Instrument and the samples will be put into that folder, and it will create another folder called "Sampler Instruments" that contains only that Instrument. Now you've got to move them to the correct locations manually. This is a bit of a hassle, since you've got to do some manual clean-up in the Finder to move things to their correct locations, but is useful because it is sort of like a "consolidate" function in that it copies only the samples which are actually referenced by the current Instrument. This is useful if you're creating an Instrument that uses a bunch of samples from a source folder, but
not all of those samples, and you want to automatically copy
only the used samples to a new location. Note that the referenced samples are
copied,
not moved, from the original location, and that the source samples and source folder remain exactly as they were before.
It's all clear as mud, right? The only thing I'm not totally sure of is whether an Instrument that's Saved or Exported from within the Editor window inherits the current state (and possibly edited from the saved state) of the front panel settings, or whether it uses the previously-saved settings. But you can figure that one out in ten seconds.
I really wish you could assign key commands to the Recall / Save / Delete / Copy / Paste Settings commands in the front-panel Options menu - it gets a little tiring to constantly pull down that menu and precisely navigate to the correct command when I'm jacking around with 173 newly-imported Instruments and trying to give them all the same front panel settings. So I guess that would be one "feature request" I'd have.