[flats]

I think we both have a lot of room for being wrong! There seem to be no reliable sources for DAW market share, and I imagine all of these companies consider it in their interests to keep the number of active users of their software to themselves. So anything I have to say here is purely anecdotal.

From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.

In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).

What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.

[robenkleene]

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

> What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

This is purely just from reading opinions of folks online, they seem to think Live has advantages for being more tailored for electronic music, and Logic is more dated, and some of the more entry-level features (e.g., ML session players) rub people the wrong way.

Also awesome to hear the love for Cycling 74! Max is perhaps my personal favorite piece of software ever, and that same group I follow I mainly see actually complaining about it in Live! I maintain a couple of Max for Live plugins:

https://github.com/robenkleene/sidewinder

https://github.com/robenkleene/thwomp

[dagmx]

Ableton is king for electronic music, but isn’t a very strong DAW for general audio work outside of that.

there’s a lot of genres out there and Logic is still considered one of the best for general DAWs out there.

[flats]

Feel you on the entry-level features making people worried that Apple is prosumer-izing their baby. I worry about that sometimes.

Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.

I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.

What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…