User guide

292 Chapter 12 Getting to Know Regions
Audio Regions and Audio Files
Audio regions simply refer to (point to) an underlying audio file. Audio regions are
merely used as playback markers (start and end points) that can be as long as the
entire audio file, or may only be a few seconds long, playing a small portion of the
audio file that the (region) start and end markers encompass.
Any audio file used in Logic Express (added to the project, and therefore the Audio Bin)
is automatically linked to at least one audio region that defaults to the length of the
entire audio file.
Audio regions contain a temporal reference point called the anchor. When you move
an audio region, it’s not the start point that is displayed in the help tag (as with MIDI
regions)—it is the anchor point.
You can freely create as many audio regions as needed. To give you an example of
where this may be useful, imagine a live stereo drum track that runs for the duration of
your project. During the second chorus, the drummer played perfectly, but was a little
sloppy during all other chorus sections. Logic Express allows you to create an audio
region that points to the second chorus section of the overall (drum track) audio file,
and use this perfect take in multiple places in the project.
This is achieved by creating one audio region (that points to chorus 2 in the drum track
audio file), and copying it to each position that the chorus occurs in the Arrange area.
A great benefit of working with audio regions, rather than audio files is that they use
very little memory, whereas multiple copies of the same section of the audio file would
require a lot of hard disk storage space.
It is, of course, possible to directly edit, copy, move, and manage audio files. This is
achieved in the Sample Editor and Audio Bin. Details found in Chapter 24, “Managing
Audio Files,” on page 559.
Audio region 1
Audio file
Audio region 2
Audio
region 3