Living With Logic 9

One of my favourite music bloggers, Waveformless, has posted a list of likes an dislikes for the new version of Logic. It’s a good read and always fascinating to see what other users are experiencing. For example, I had not yet experimented with the new orchestral content in the ESX24 sampler. I’ve also not really played much with the new warped convolution reverbs, which a lot of people are raving about.

Anyway, here’s my quick list of likes and dislikes for Logic 9,

LIKES

Not a lot has changed – Apple got the strategy right by dropping the price and trying to make Logic a better studio platform, rather than a suite of software instruments. Most users are investing in third party plugins for their area of interest anyway, so we don’t need a lot of new plugins and soft-synths with every release.

Notes – This is the big workflow improvement for me. Makes it so much easier to pick up where I left off on a project. I’ve now gone through every live project I have an made notes and GTD-ish next actions. Brilliant!

Flex Time – This is the big one for a lot of people and I’m no different. In fact, it has made me start playing a lot of bass again!

Drum Replace – Actually, I’m not suing this for its original purpose, but rather to create beats from handclaps and guitar strums. You can create some amazing hi hat patterns from picked guitar lines and also replace poorly recorded hand percussion with top flight samples fast.

Track Colouring – There are lots of small improvements in Logic, like the ability to colour your tracks and track regions more effectively.

Window Highlight – Another small cosmetic enhancement that makes it easier to see the selected window.

New Amps – I don’t use the amp plugins much, but the new ones are a vast improvement. I could almost imagine using these in a session. Almost.

DISLIKES

Doesn’t Quite Work In 64 Bit – OK, I’m jumping the gun on this, since Apple don’t yet claim it works properly under Snow Leopard in 64 nit mode. But, it almost does and my experience is that it’s quite fast in a lot of ways. But, be careful about creating projects in 64 bit, then reopening them in 32 bit. When I’ve done that it hasn’t worked well…

EQ Analyser Bug – Sometimes the EQ trace doesn’t sync with the music. Not a practical problem, but disconcerting.

MIDI Editing – Occasionally editing in the Piano Roll window gets glitchy.

Waveburner Is Still Not All That – Apple give you mastering app with Logic Studio, but it is not stellar. Really should have a better suite of metering and analysis tools.

That’s it for now. I’m working on a longer blogpost, outlining how I use templates for creating projects and mixes, that should outline a few more of the things Logic 9 has going for it and a couple of limitations I’d like to see ironed out in future versions.

EDIT This morning (sept 23), Apple released updates for Logic and Mainstage, with a number of fixes. Downloading now.