While following the exercise “Creating Blue Apple Loops” on page 262 of “Logic Pro 8 and Logic Express 8” by David Nahmani, I was running into some trouble.

1. Open Logic project file: “07 New Day”.
2. Drag the Marquee tool (Command-click tool) over the High Arpeggio region from bar 5 to bar 7. Verify that before releasing the mouse button, the help tag reads “5 1 1 1 7 1 1 1”, indicating that Marquee selection goes from bar 5 to bar 7 and is thus 2 bars in length.
3. Click the Marquee selection with the Pointer tool to create a new region that should be exactly 2 bars in length.
4. In the Arrange area’s local menu bar, choose Region > Add to Apple Loops Library.

Expected Results:
The dialog should offer the choice of “Loop” or “One-shot”.

Actual Results:
The choice of “Loop” or “One-shot” is grayed out.

According to the book and http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301036, this graying out is a symptom of having a region that is not a whole number of bars in length, but this region seems to be exactly 2 bars in length as far as I can tell.

I posted about this on the Logic Pro Help forums (run by Mr. Nahmani; not Apple) and Mr. Nahmani kindly pointed me to an earlier thread that explains the problem and how to work around it. Basically, the bug is that the help tag is indicating that the region is 2 bars in length, when in fact, it’s actually a bit shorter. The remedy is to tweak the region a bit to make it shorter and then to make it exactly 2 bars in length.

I hope this helps other folks who run into this problem. And I hope Apple fixes this bug.