The Song Fight Bulletin Board

So, over the last few years, Logic 9 has been getting more and more flaky and hard to deal with, and hasn't kept up with the ever-changing world of OSX. I was getting ready to jump ship, even going so far as to buy REAPER and Kontakt and a few other things so I'd have an escape plan.

But Logic Pro X finally came out after years of rumors and speculation, and I'm happy to report that not only does it fix all of the problems with Logic 9, it greatly improves it in every way.

I mostly stuck with Logic because it had a UI which makes sense to me (unlike most DAWs), and X's is very different, but also a lot cleaner and more robust. It's always ridiculously clear where to go, and it's made things more consistent with the rest of OSX without actually losing any of the power. I'm still refamiliarizing myself with a few things but all in all it's an improvement all around. Everything's simpler but nothing's missing, and it's also way easier on the eyes as well.

They've also finally added quite a few things that make my life a lot easier:

• You can now automate a bunch of controls as a group
• MIDI event routing is a lot easier to set up; now they have a separate MIDI effect chain, similar to what REAPER does, rather than forcing you to go through the "Environment" window, and the various plugins are much easier to deal with than the old Environment crap
• There's an automatic drummer thing that's pretty flexible, and while the defaults are pretty dumb you can easily get around those and do some pretty crazy stuff really easily
• There's WAY more softsynths included now, and the new ones are even easier to tweak and tune (the old ones still have the same crappy interfaces though)
• The piano roll interface has been completely reworked, and everything about it just plain kicks ass
• FlexTime controls now apply to MIDI as well as audio (same as on REAPER)
• The preset library isn't complete crap, and the presets which are there are much easier to use as starting points for other things

and most importantly, I'm no longer getting bullshit "audio system overload" dialog boxes that pop up every 10 seconds and ruin my flow, so maybe I'll actually be able to complete some music again.

On the minus side, they seem to have added a lot of tools to make it easier to produce dubstep, so expect even more of that to flood the airwaves.

Anyway, if you've been getting frustrated with Logic and were on the fence about upgrading, I recommend it.

bought it last night. looking forward to digging in. it's worth the money just for Drummer, and if the new arpeggiator is anything like GB on the iPad, that will be awesome.

If you haven't yet, start the miscellaneous content downloads. That part takes FOREVER, what with being several DVDs' worth of content. Also, you will have to baby the installation since it needs admin privileges but each install needs to get permissions separately (I don't understand why they didn't just launch all the installations from a single trusted process... argh) so you end up having to reauthenticate every time the permissions window runs out.