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Logic Pro X

233 points| SanderMak | 12 years ago |apple.com | reply

230 comments

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[+] mambodog|12 years ago|reply
I've been a long time Logic Pro user. Since the updates to Logic slowed to a trickle I've also been using Ableton Live a fair bit. I've always appreciated Logic's clean, well laid out interface (as opposed to say, Cubase) and its general sense of respect for the intelligence of its users.

Unfortunately it seems Apple has gone in the direction of Garageband-ifiyng Logic; pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds. The interface is dominated by the flashy new features such as the 'Drummer' and 'Drum Kit Designer' which effectively let you combine a limited set of preset drum sounds with a limited set of preset drumming styles. The result is a similar 'toy' feel to that of Garageband.

Professional tools for creativity afford the user the ability to manipulate, combine and repurpose them in as much depth and complexity as user can manage, so that they may seek out new forms, rather than just creating pastiche rehashes of existing ideas. It is apparent from the direction Logic has taken that it is no longer aimed at the professional market, but rather more to the 'Prosumer' category, who aspire to be 'Pro', but who still need a lot of hand-holding.

The most displeasing change I've noticed so far is that the 'bypass' button on each instrument and effect, which neatly fitted in with Logic's formerly clean and understated visual style, has now been replaced with a large glowing on/off 'light'. It is succinctly represents all of the changes across the application which discard neat and elegant design for absolute naive ease of use.

I have a feeling I'll be using Ableton more from now on.

[+] scrumper|12 years ago|reply
Your comment is a bit like free jazz: it's all very impressive on the surface, but it doesn't really mean anything and ultimately one feels like it was just an exercise in ego massage.

Logic has long had a home in the 'pro' world at the songwriting and demo production stage. You'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer in a commercial studio doing tracking or mixing in anything other than Pro Tools (though they certainly exist), but Logic has a healthy following with artists themselves. When viewed through that lens, the changes made in this version are a pretty natural progression for the software: for the most part, they're aimed at the writing and tracking process.

With that in mind, the 'Drummer' feature is less 'Garageband-y' than it might look: it's a considerably more flexible alternative to the giant pool of pre-recorded beats (Apple Loops) that Logic has had for a long time. Such a tool is pretty useful to the songwriter putting a demo together, to the music-for-picture composer, to the ever-growing army of artists who ship off near-completed songs to musician-for-hire studios on the web. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard those loops in commercial recordings (often in TV music, which is composed under deadlines to tighter budgets). I'm looking forward to being able to have my temporary backing rhythm follow the sections of a song: far better than trying to find a matching loop or building a beat from scratch when all you want is to lay down a guitar part and focus on developing your idea.

Your argument about the bypass button is just silly. If you have a bunch of plugins open on screen at once, it's obviously better to be able to see, at a glance, which ones are on or off. The old way made that harder. Clearly you have never sat for half an hour tweaking a compressor, certain of the improvement it was making, only to realize the damn thing was in bypass the entire time.

I can see more Pro-oriented things in there than you: a redesigned channel strip that reorients itself according to signal flow. Meters that work. A scriptable MIDI processor. Flex pitch, or whatever they called it. I also see a crisper UI and a clever way to facilitate interaction with complex instruments and plugins (the Smart Control macro thingies).

Of course, I'm just an amateur, so I suppose my opinion doesn't count. I suspect that you are too, but perhaps I'm just more comfortable with it.

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EDIT: I guess my long-winded point is this: why does it matter whether you think the program is becoming 'easier to use' (the horror); all that should matter is whether the new features are meaningful to you, and whether it breaks anything you need at present.

I work in enterprise software by day, and our UX team is constantly looking to consumer software and devices for usability ideas. There is absolutely nothing inherently bad about making something difficult become easy to use. It cuts down on errors, makes people happier, decreases stress, and makes them more productive. All of these things are just as valuable in the studio as they are in the accounts receivable office. There is nothing 'pro' about making life difficult for yourself.

[+] coldtea|12 years ago|reply
>I've been a long time Logic Pro user. Since the updates to Logic slowed to a trickle I've also been using Ableton Live a fair bit.

They never slowed. Logic had like 9 point updates, some with impressive new features (64-bit, OSC, etc).

>Unfortunately it seems Apple has gone in the direction of Garageband-ifiyng Logic; pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds. The interface is dominated by the flashy new features such as the 'Drummer' and 'Drum Kit Designer' which effectively let you combine a limited set of preset drum sounds with a limited set of preset drumming styles. The result is a similar 'toy' feel to that of Garageband.

No, it's not at all. Actually you never even get to see the "Drummer" and the "Drum Kit Designer" unless you need them. The Drummer is basically nothing more than a kick ass intelligent drum plugin, like Strike (by Digidesign), Studio Drummer (NI), etc.

Logic has all the power of Logic 9 AND tons of new stuff besides. In fact, for recording, playing and adjusting your own ideas, it has more power than ever, with new instruments, new editing functions (the melodyne like thing for one), MIDI mangling, Bass amps, etc.

The "using other people sounds" is such a small part of Logic that what you write doesn't even make sense. A meager few GB library of loops, that were there always.

In fact, if anything, it's the opposite: Live was from the start touted as an easy to use app to mange loops and beats, sampled or bought. It's very core is about mangling loops and keeping them in sync. And it's mostly geared towards electronic music, where "using other people's sounds" is a very big thing. Of course it has since added MIDI and other stuff, but Logic was an is an all around DAW -- and it's the one you see in most professional studios with the exception of Pro Tools (or, sometimes, alongside PT).

[+] illicium|12 years ago|reply
> pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds

Ableton Live is even more centered around building music around loops and samples. Obviously you can track and mix recorded instruments in it just as well, but the live composition view (as opposed to the more traditional, linear arrangement view) that gives Ableton 50% of its name cannot be understated.

[+] bti|12 years ago|reply
What kind of music do you make? I've been wanting to try Ableton out but it kind of looks geared toward working with samples and MIDI. I mostly record guitars and all my instruments live with a mic. Is Ableton appropriate for recording and mixing recorded music? Would you say it is as powerful as Logic Pro 9 (my primary DAW)?
[+] wavesounds|12 years ago|reply
Has anyone tried using Github to manage and share a Logic Pro project?

I work on music with someone 300 miles away and I'd love to have the power of git. Right now were both using different DAWs and export audio to dropbox. This release of Logic looks great and my partner is already using Logic so if I switch over and implemented git we could ideally be working off the same files all the time with version tracking, backups and branches.

I could see it potentially being very large though and merging audio files probably wouldn't be possible so maybe this is something that still needs to be built?

[+] Griever|12 years ago|reply
I've actually been storing my Logic projects on GitHub for a while. It works pretty well for the most part, but I do run into some issues when dealing with the size of the files. Perhaps Logic X shrinks them down in size a bit in comparison to Logic 9, but I doubt it.

Here's the repo if you are interested: https://github.com/jpsullivan/LogicProjects

One day I'd really like to make an open source album that people could fork to remix entirely new sounds. It'd also be nice to get some people talking about best practices when mixing. Perhaps a Logic Bootstrap if you will.

[+] tomphoolery|12 years ago|reply
Yes. It works.

documentData is your project file. It includes the "code" needed to make your project go. This can be diffed, merged and branched with almost no effort. You will see the effects in Logic. You have to save & close Logic before doing the Git stuff, then reopen it to see your changes.

Everything else is pretty much binary WAV files. Logic is nice about creating new WAVs for every change you make, so while all the files do take up a bit of space it makes diffing a bit easier (manually, you can't `git diff` audio files).

BTW some friends and I are working on an service that does this, using Git and everything, and allowing you to use any DAW you wish: http://notepunch.com

[+] igorgue|12 years ago|reply
blend.io is trying to do that.

You just have to make sure to include all your samples in your project, in ableton you do that with the "Collect and save all" option, Logic has one but I don't remember how it is called.

[+] thirdsun|12 years ago|reply
I've been looking for something like that too, but the problem with this is the fact that everyone that wants to participate has to be on the same page and that includes third party plugins and instruments. Of course you can't assume that the guy you're working with has the same plugins. How could that be handled?

A bounced audio track won't allow a lot of deeper editing. Midi only doesn't tell the recipient anything about the instrument you used in your original version.

Of course I'm describing the issues from a perspective of someone who tends to rather work with synthesized material than recorded audio, which doesn't apply to every artist, yet it remains a very difficult problem, a dropbox folder or simple file exchange won't make it work in my opinion.

[+] capkutay|12 years ago|reply
Although idea of sharing music across the web sounds appealing in theory, as a musician, I personally wouldn't love the idea of working hard on something and 'web-collaborating' with a stranger and have them possibly add things to a song that I wouldn't like hearing in person.

On the other hand, the github idea is interesting. You "open-source" your music and allow others to fork it while still having some form of version control and rolling back if you don't like the changes or just want to revert to a different stage in the mix.

[+] jolohaga|12 years ago|reply
It seems Apple could in part address this by including iCloud support in Logic.
[+] PabloOsinaga|12 years ago|reply
we are working on a new app to make it easy to do music together over the internet. working hard to release a beta soon, but here is some prototype/early alpha info/demo: http://getbandhub.com

would love to hear from people that are interested in this - you can reach out directly to me [email protected]

[+] NamTaf|12 years ago|reply
For a company that just threw out skeuomorphism as a design principle, the amount of drumkit, pedal, amp and mixing deck images this thing has is surprising.

The pitch correction stuff is cool - I dreamed of that sort of stuff a while ago, but never made any attempt to try to work out how it'd work. I wonder how it works with voices and the like, as opposed to string instruments.

[+] nsxwolf|12 years ago|reply
It shouldn't be surprising. The real instruments aren't going anywhere and are found side by side with installations of Logic Pro. These images aren't archaic reminders of objects no longer used in daily life.

It's not like the iOS Phone app icon, which depicts the outline of a style of phone handset many people below a certain age have never seen or laid hands on.

[+] saturdaysaint|12 years ago|reply
I swear I recall (probably on the excellent createdigitalmusic.com) a quote from an Apple engineer around the release of Logic 9 saying that musicians consistently rate skeutomorphic plugins as sounding better than flatter counterparts.
[+] eclipxe|12 years ago|reply
Pro Audio software has always been ground zero for skeuomorphism.
[+] apike|12 years ago|reply
It's unlikely the Logic Pro team were disclosed on the iOS 7 design direction before WWDC. Even if there was a push to "flatten" Logic, it would have been too late in the cycle to do it for this release.
[+] bsaul|12 years ago|reply
The price tag really reflects that the music industry is the poorest of all creative industries (aka video, photo, 3D and web). When i think about all the genius algorithms and technologies that products like Ableton or logic Pro ship it really saddens me.
[+] calinet6|12 years ago|reply
As with many of Apple's recent price drops (OSX, iWork, etc. etc.) I think it's a highly strategic and intentional move, not reflective of the greater market, but showing that Apple is enabling the larger success of their brand by enabling more people to purchase and use these pro apps at a lower price point. Plus, it will sell Macs, both laptops and Mac Pros. Smart.
[+] joeblau|12 years ago|reply
Logic has been $200 for a while. Even though Logic uses Audio Unit plugins, I don't think there is really any substitute for physical hardware. You can get this to run a project on the cheap, but it's still going to cost you $1000+ for a good mic and +600+ hardware like compressors, limiters, equalizers, monitors, and mixing boards. Plus you have to get cabling, power conditioners and cases to hold and connect everything. My last "Home Studio" ran me nearly $10,000; Logic was the cheapest thing I had to buy and that's when it was around $700.
[+] igorgue|12 years ago|reply
I think it's all about demand, that's why prices are lower, these days demand is a lot more than before, and everything is really accessible.

With that being said, it's not cheap if you add other things you have to buy, studio monitors, a fast computer, and good midi keyboard (and that's the minimum for a full in-the-box musician).

[+] cageface|12 years ago|reply
Apple sells Logic at cut rate prices to help sell their hardware. Other comparable packages cost much more. The music software business is pretty tough, but not as tough as this alone would suggest.
[+] Sephiroth87|12 years ago|reply
Apple stuff is expensive = Bad Apple stuff is cheap = Bad

LOGIC!!!

[+] bpicolo|12 years ago|reply
Well, with Photoshop you don't really have competition. There are a lot of players in the music editing business. Competition = lower prices.
[+] gideon_b|12 years ago|reply
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion, Mac software is priced as bait for Apple hardware. Professional recording equipment is very expensive, and high-end producers have no qualms spending a few grand on Pro Tools plugins. Logic isn't the Photoshop of recording, it's more like Sketch.
[+] stephth|12 years ago|reply
Exciting addition, almost missed it:

Scripter

Extensible plug-in that can process or generate MIDI data using standard JavaScript.

[+] zefhous|12 years ago|reply
One of the drummer demos is very reminiscent of "A Sorta Fairytale" by Tori Amos:

http://cl.ly/163g410m402w

Just a tad faster and the kick is more busy, but very much the same feel.

[+] ssharp|12 years ago|reply
I think this is going to push me fully over the edge to record my non-EDM music on the Mac. I had been teetering between FL Studio & Sonar on Windows and various OSX-based DAWs for this purpose and am ready to settle on something permanent. Logic adoption has been growing substantially and I feel 100% safe jumping head-first into the Logic ecosystem.

In general, I've been a Mac user for everything but production for over a decade and am so sick of keeping a Windows machine running for sake of production. I don't think I could switch over for EDM/hip-hop though, as my workflow is so engrained in FL Studio and I use so many advanced controls and features.

[+] marknutter|12 years ago|reply
Can any musicians in the know about music software comment on how this compares to say, Ableton Live?
[+] icarus_drowning|12 years ago|reply
No 32-bit plugins is an interesting choice. Logic 9 can be launched in 64-bit mode with a 32-bit bridge that opens/closes based on whether or not you have any 32-bit VST/AU plugins trying to run. I've got a couple of Sonnox plugins that aren't available in 64-bit which is going to keep me off Logic X until they [Sonnox] get their act together.

Edit: Clarifying a poor use of a pronoun.

[+] isomorph|12 years ago|reply
Very happy about this, although probably means I'm going to redo all the tracks I've been making in the last few months while getting to grips with Logic Pro 9...
[+] mhax|12 years ago|reply
The $199.99 price tag is a surprise. Could anyone speculate as to why they'd be pitching it this low, given the price of competitors products?
[+] imissmyjuno|12 years ago|reply
For me, the most interesting part is the iPad remote. Looks like Apple is getting into distributed interfaces.
[+] cpenner461|12 years ago|reply
As mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6052122) I've been considering getting a DAW to hobby shop around with. I've lightly dabbled with several over the years, and am very comfortable on my actual instrument, but am a bit overwhelmed when I look at some of these for doing anything other than just recording and basic mixing/editing (would be nice to build some background/accompanying tracks from some of the synths etc). I think I just need to pick one and dive in to figure out how it all works - are there any resources anyone here can recommend for doing just that? Are the provided tutorials from the DAW vendors sufficient?
[+] securingsincity|12 years ago|reply
For the price i would say this is a pretty ok deal. the other Digital Audio workstations(DAWs) offer a lot of the same features. I was a protools engineer for a while and some of the things they are touting are far from new and protools usually lagged behind sonar and cubase in raw feature set. I have been punting on upgrading from protools 7.4(5+ years) and m-audio delta 1010lt and 44 for a very long time (10 years). What I want to see is hardware that takes advantage of the huge throughput of thunderbolt or usb3, that allows for higher quality audio and many ins and outs. as far as software Reaper - i havent used it in a year or so - for the price is the best DAW on the market no question.
[+] graublau|12 years ago|reply
Good thing I bought Logic 9 four weeks ago...
[+] akrs|12 years ago|reply
Check out Blend.io. Its a betaworks-studio product for open-source, cross-geo music collaboration. It currently supports Ableton Live and Maschine but support for other DAWs (including Logic) is coming soon.
[+] caplingerc|12 years ago|reply
"Retro Synth. Far-out sounds. Not so far away."

hopefully this means they got rid of the ridiculously over-complicated extraterrestrial-looking synth interfaces in favor of something that actually makes sense.

[+] Roboprog|12 years ago|reply
Do the pitch bend and modulation wheel controls (via MIDI) actually do anything with most of the synth sounds?

I've only just started tinkering with the "little brother" Garage Band program, but I was disappointed how bad support was for the pitch bend wheel from my keyboard into the supplied patches. (using pitch bend would cause secondary "note on" events which never got a "note off")

[+] brunorsini|12 years ago|reply
This took forever... I'm impressed by the many updates but think I might just stick to Pro Tools. Switching DAWs is a bit like switching programming languages, in a sense, huge time cost.

The built-in iPad remote control is cool though. Neyrinck makes a good one for Pro Tools, however: http://www.neyrinck.com/v-control-pro

[+] lewispollard|12 years ago|reply
'Modern' interface a little extra Melodyne-like functionality with flex pitch, everything else just seems like it was already there but is now easier to access (ie arpeggiator without having to use the environment window)... Am I missing anything major?
[+] icarus_drowning|12 years ago|reply
The drum stuff seems new, but at first glance looks quite gimmicky. As a professional composer, the last thing I want to see is a picture of a drumkit and various performers in the middle of my DAW interface.
[+] droithomme|12 years ago|reply
You can write MIDI processing plugins using Javascript, that's pretty big. And most everything is now pushed to the iPad for touch editing.
[+] williamcotton|12 years ago|reply
And it looks like the finally removed the Environment completely!

[EDIT] Nope, the Environment is still there, my bad!