Digital Performer Vs Logic Pro X

[Shooshie]

It opens those that. One with logic but not all 3rd party instruments. And so of these if not ost , do. It have a Mach five version.

Oookaayyy. Maybe it's time to put a muzzle on the spell checker!

[bayswater]

Yes. It should say those that "come" with logic. I was standing on a crowded bus using an iPhone when I wrote that.

[iGirl]

Logic is subsidized by iPhone sales. Let's face it. Apple could give away Logic for nothing and it wouldn't matter to them. The Logic side of their business doesn't have to be profitable. It just has to sell computers.

IMO looking at the fact that Logic is one of App store's best selling apps it's hard write off the strategy as being a loss leader,

I have to say, coming back to this when I first started looking around, I immediately noticed DP was not getting hardly even a mention online in DAW roundups and discussions. I thought it was quite odd if not disturbing that this kind of exclusion was happening to what I still consider to be one of the top DAWs on the market. I once worked in the industry, and knew Jim Cooper and some other folks at MOTU back in the 90s and their marketing efforts were at full speed back then - though there was also a lot less competition.

Back to this century though - while us old pros all know MOTU well (working pros have it, new pros learn of it) - I think the fundamental demographic difference is that Logic is the DAW for "everyone" - while DP gets more attention from pros. The problem is, that a 16 year old "future pro" on OS X is far more likely to have GarageBand and graduate to Logic than just jump right in the deep end with DP. DP gets the PC market advantage, but got to the market a little late so there's much more competition, and many old pros had already ensconced into other DAWs by the time they got there.

The takeaway from this is that IMO Logic may likely outsell DP by a wide margin. Certainly on OS X, keeping in mind Apple is global. So surely it's no loss leader, but makes plenty of profit in sheer sales quantities notwithstanding very deep pockets from the mothership. It has the mass market machine/appeal and the price point to capture the all-important, young, up and coming generation demographic, and unfortunately DP isn't as well known outside of pro circles. Maybe they are happy in the high end market only - if not, MOTU would be very wise to hire me as a marketing consultant, and build a DP Lite.

[Phil O]

...Maybe they are happy in the high end market only - if not, MOTU would be very wise to hire me as a marketing consultant, and build a DP Lite.

Indeed! Ya know, I've never understood why DP has remained in the shadows. It really is a superb piece of software. You'd think ProTools and DP would be duking it out as the heavyweight contenders. That's my thought on it, anyway.

Phil

[James Steele]

What I mean to say is the viability of Apple in no way hinges on Logic sales. That takes a lot of pressure off. And they can afford to "give away" their VIs.

[mhschmieder]

I haven't had time to follow the entire thread (just bits and pieces), but am popping in briefly just to say that I am buying Logic Pro X as soon as I upgrade my SSD (a prerequisite since I don't have enough disc space for any major installations to run at this point).

I need it for one specific feature, that I tried to get via a VST plug-in (freebie) but which doesn't even run properly in Studio One v3: MIDI Note On Velocity to CC.

I have written about this before (a while back), related to retracing legacy MIDI using modern tools that are CC based (such as the SWAM engine from Sample Modeling) and not wanting to lose the nuances of my original performances (some of this is jazz), but until this week hadn't searched thoroughly on-line to see if there is a solution (the consensus was that DP can't do it).

Much to my surprise, this is a major advertised feature of Logic Pro X (at least the recent update in January 2015, if not in earlier versions). That feature alone is worth $200 to me.

It was a surprise to me, because I'd always thought DP was universally the most advanced MIDI editor of all the DAW's. And I think that is probably a true statement in general, but I guess I thought it unlikely that any comparisons to other products would produce an intersection set with exclusions on both sides vs. all other products being subsets of what DP offers.

As far as I could tell, this is NOT a feature promised for DP9.

What I am specifically talking about is the ability to convert a MIDI performance that was done from a keyboard -- without additional controllers -- into one that can use expression, volume, breath, or other MIDI CC events to modulate the attack and/or the volume of notes vs. standard MIDI Note One Velocity. Apparently this is a non-trivial conversion task, given how rare it is as a feature or one-off utility.

Of secondary importance, I'd like to be able to convert aftertouch to other types of MIDI information, when confronted later with a different sound choice that doesn't work with AT or doesn't use it in a meaningful way related to my original performance.

[bayswater]

Maybe I'm missing something. I use expression to to control volume, and other CCs to control other things in Garritan. And I do it with MIDI that was recorded without that in mind.

[mhschmieder]

Shooshie did a good job of explaining all of this a few years ago. At any rate, if you start with a keyboard based trigger and/or sound for a woodwind or brass instrument, you are likely controlling it via how hard you hit the keys. That's how the patches are usually programmed.

Volume, expression, and breath achieve different things. The Yamaha WX5 wind controller lets you set things up several ways, knowing that you might be stuck in a non-ideal context. But I'm not going to match an earlier performance and I like how I played it ("it" being dozens of pieces and/or parts that were done when I had different limitations of technology than now).

Also, if I start with notation, I can use DP's various tools to humanize and improve on a pseudo-performance -- I have gotten EXTREMELY good at this -- but then I need to transfer the various note control attributes to different types of data and messaging than notation allows on its own.

I am very much NOT a fan of "drawing" MIDI CC curves after the fact. I tried it a few years ago, succeeded once, only partially liked the results vs. other approaches, and didn't succeed thereafter and thus gave up as I didn't see the bang-for-buck anyway.

For example, things like The Trombone (a Kontakt library) have some tricky things you need to do to get the slide effect, and they are more easily analyzed and hand-tweaked due to all of the factors that go into how they end up performing (tempo, note overlap, size of interval, volume, rate of portamento, etc.).

[bayswater]

So, what is it that logic x does technically in this regard that DP doesn't.

I can see not wanting to edit these controllers by drawing curves in a MIDI editor but you can set up hardware controllers (you have the Arturia IIRC) and record the controllers in real time during MIDI playback. Maybe not as good as recording the MIDI and manipulating the controllers at the same time, but what logic do that improves the situation?

[mhschmieder]

Quite simply, Logic allows direct conversion of MIDI Note On Velocity to any CC that you choose. I can't remember whether it also support conversion of Aftertouch.

This is highly intricate stuff where it's all in the nuance, which happened during original inception. I have a lot of material like that, where my playing reacted to which parameters and controllers the original sound source implemented. Some of it is jazz, some ethnic, and some of it would be of the soundscape category.

In some cases, I may simply want to double a sound. I'll edit a lot at that point, but I need to match the performance per se. It just happens to be one of the ways I arrange, depending on material and the types of sounds. Out of my 800+ projects that are committed to disc, perhaps as much as 10% include non-dupliucatable performances.

Maybe I should have mentioned that I work in a lot of odd time signatures with polyrhythms and sometimes non-Western scales.

I started reading up on POLAR tonight during dinner, because I'm thinking it might help me in these cases where it needs to sound organic and live but also has to be dead-on accurate. So maybe I can eventually generate new MIDI performances that are as dynamic and breathe as freely as the originals.

In general, I have to have too many tracks playing to be able to get to low enough latency to be able to generate a good enough after-the-fact MIDI CC curve in real-time.

[bayswater]

Ok I see what you're getting at. But will this save you from edit chores? The phrases using velocity are not necessarily going to sound right when the velocity values are converted to a CC value.

[mikehalloran]

My daughter posted the following to her Facebook page this afternoon:

Creating the album:
10% writing songs,
10% arranging and recording demos,
30% waiting for the files to sync/zip/save/upload/download
50% going to google and typing in "Logic pro x how to ___"

[Robert Randolph]

My daughter posted the following to her Facebook page this afternoon:

Creating the album:
10% writing songs,
10% arranging and recording demos,
30% waiting for the files to sync/zip/save/upload/download
50% going to google and typing in "Logic pro x how to ___"

Does she know that Logic has an awesome built in help system? You can mouse over almost anything, hit shift-? and it will go straight to the appropriate help page. Most of the help pages are fully cross-linked and have a good amount of pertinent information.

DP's manual is one of the best written DAW manuals, but I would love to have Logic Pro X's help system any day.

[mikehalloran]

Does she know that Logic has an awesome built in help system? You can mouse over almost anything, hit shift-? and it will go straight to the appropriate help page

If she didn't before, she does now. Thanks!

[Shooshie]

DP's manual is one of the best written DAW manuals, but I would love to have Logic Pro X's help system any day.

It's been a long time since I've used it, but doesn't DP have a less detailed version of the same thing? Seems like you could hit the ? key or something like that, then click on something, and get the help page for that. Then there are the help tags, which at least label things so you can look them up. Not the same as Logic's vast help system, but it's good to know that DP hasn't merely passed over the help features.

Shooshie