Digital Performer Vs Logic Pro X

[dewdman42]

the truth is all MIDI data enters into the computer as a single stream, Logic just exposes that.

No sir. DP allows you to route specific MIDI ports to specific MIDI tracks for recording directly. Logic does not. All MIDI recording has to funnel through a single internal virtual MIDI port in Logic to get to the recording tracks. And worse yet, Logic has the failover method where if MIDI data is not accounted for by any of the record-armed tracks, the currently selected track will get it, even though you don't want it to. Alternatively, in DP if you don't explicitly assign a MIDI port to a MIDI track, then that MIDI will be ignored by DP. DP is much more explicit, clear, concise and predictable.

Its usually workable with some nutty environment stuff, but DP's approach is just way cleaner and explicit, handles large MIDI setups much much better. Logic works fine for a simple setup with one or two keyboards and without plugins that produce MIDI output, but as soon as you start tinkering with more elaborate MIDI routing, Logic turns into a headache and its hard to sometimes figure out what its doing because it has a lot of implicit behavior like I just described.

I disagree about the MIDI FX though, just the fact that in DP you can quickly print them to a MIDI track makes DPs approach
better.

Yea man I agree, Logic blew it on that aspect, that's why I pointed it out. But nonetheless, the MIDIFX provided by Logic and 3rd parties is way way superior to the couple of MIDI plugins provided by MOTU in proprietary plugin format. But in DP's defense, it does support VST MIDI output and awesome MIDI routing to handle it, where in Logic's case its required to use IAC to loopback MIDI from plugins back to a track for recording, which also runs into more headaches due to the single sequencer port I mentioned.

Multi instrument MIDI recording and MIDI filtering is all quite possible in Logic, the main limitation IMO with the way Logic handles it is that MIDI tracks are all deselected when you select a track without hitting the record button directly... that's a PITA IMO. To be fair though it's super easy to select say two software instrument tracks in Logic and limit their keyboard ranges so you can ply them on the same controller, without having to set that up on the controller, therefore allowing you to have different splits for different songs.

Some simple situations such as keyboard splits and zoning, etc. sure can be handled by Logic. I'm not complaining about that. The environment does have interesting abilities to tweak the MIDI stream. My main gripe with Logic is not the environment, but rather A) that we actually HAVE to mess with the environment for simple situations that should not require it and B) the single pipe into the sequencer and C) no ability to route MIDI output from any plugins to record to a track and D) the implicit nature of how MIDI is taken from that one common sequencer port and directed to various tracks based on implicit and sometimes not very clear behavior rather then explicitly the way DP does it.

In my opinion this is the most glaring lack MIDI wise that DP has.
Logic cannot route MIDI between AU's whereas DP can route MIDI between VSTs. For me the keyboard splitting issue is not a deal killer, and the MIDI between AU's is,NI Maschine requires it to work well inside a DAW.

Correct and this is where the single sequencer port becomes a problem. Its not keyboard splits. In Logic you have to find a way to route MIDI from plugins out through IAC and back in through the main sequencer port again to get to a track to record. If you are listening to some plugin produce MIDI and drive a soft instrument while trying to play another instrument with your keyboard...all of the above stuff starts to get weird. You can get it to work, but it usually takes some environment tweaking and not very straightforward thinking.

The main point I'm in agreement on though is Logics piano roll, much better, clearer to see the exact placement of notes, and no GUI glitches. Maybe none of you get this, but on my screen in DP at certain zoom settings MIDI notes in the piano roll and parsed MIDI in the Tracks Overview will overlap past their actual length, go out a zoom level and the MIDI fits into the area it's supposed to. Logic's piano roll also lights up the keyboard note you're currently playing instead of following the curser around. I find it much more useful to have it light up the note for those occasions when you're using a Kontakt instrument with a range that doesn't correlate to the piano range.

Yep, I like the piano roll in Logic way way better. I constantly find myself tweaking with the zoom in DP to try to get it to look better and never feel satisfied.

Oddly enough considering Logic's supposed placement as a great DAW for dance music, it's not that good at side chaining, whereas DP does this with ease.

Anything related to audio or MIDI routing is just simply far far far better in DP then in Logic.

[bayswater]

Same with DPs time stretching beat detection etc. If there's an area where MOTU really need to upgrade DP to the modern era it's in that area.

I've used beat detection in DP and Logic a lot to establish tempo tracks, and can't say that Logic is any better at it. Getting a good smooth tempo map takes a while in both and follows pretty much the same process. If you have a track with a clean tempo map built in, then yes, Logic is easier, but both are pretty easy once you have a tempo map established. As for stretching, Logic has added easy to use tools, but the sonic result is not that great.

[dewdman42]

Logic has been significantly buggier than DP for a long time. Finding that a documented feature doesn't actually work after a few hours of trying is not helpful. It happens in DP too with .00 releases, but a lot more in Logic.

My experience the past week or two trying out Logic, this has been the case. Logic has some weird stuff going on in some cases.

One thing that kept coming up a lot was that it would stop playback and say "overloaded the cpu", when my CPU meter was barely over 50%. There is no way to tell it to keep playing even with dropouts if that happens. It only will stop the playback and force you to find some way to reduce CPU overhead.

Another thing it kept doing a lot is interrupting play back with a dialog that says something about project sample rate not matching the device while synchronizing MIDI, or something like that..and giving some random sample rate in the dialog box every time. Huh? Looking for help about this, many other people experienced this and the only help from Apple is basically to try to reduce CPU overhead and that somehow if the CPU is taxing too much this may happen. In short, they don't have a fix at all for it. I never really pushed my CPU past 50% and I was getting that all the time, particularly when I had a plugin the produces MIDI at the same time as audio.

Another weird bug...the plugin I wanted to use that produces MIDI, would only play properly in sync with the metronome if it was on the track that was currently record armed. Given the oddball implicit MIDI routing behavior, that is also a problem.

I really like the workflow of Logic though, in terms of the creation process. As others have pointed out, they have made certain tasks just a lot easier and musically intuitive from a musician's point of view. Where I feel DP excels is that they have thought through the engineering challenges and worked it all out many years ago...that's why DP's routing is awesome. That's why bugs like the above ones would be totally unacceptable to the DP engineering crowd and MOTU makes sure the system works reliably, and in a way that will keep the project moving. But I do think that the music creation process...the artist part of us..is somewhat inhibited by DP compared to Logic..due to the way the GUI is laid out, the amount of mouse clicking it takes to get this or that done, etc. With Logic its like play, bam play, bam, there's the piano roll, move the note, bam, there's the region, with boundaries are right on bar lines, expand it, loop it, bam...move it there, bam...take a loop, its in sync, bam.. it just happens....easily. MOTU could definitely improve DP in this regard, but I feel that the engineering side of things is far far superior in DP compared to Logic...and I doubt Logic is ever going to get the attention to detail to address many of those concerns, including the bugs and odd behavior.

[mikehalloran]

I have told my daughter many times that I could teach her to use DP in less time than it takes for her to debug her latest project in Logic. Oh well.

[Phil O]

Our kids know better than us, Mike. Haven't you learned that yet?

[Michael Canavan]

the truth is all MIDI data enters into the computer as a single stream, Logic just exposes that.

No sir. DP allows you to route specific MIDI ports to specific MIDI tracks for recording directly. Logic does not. All MIDI recording has to funnel through a single internal virtual MIDI port in Logic to get to the recording tracks. And worse yet, Logic has the failover method where if MIDI data is not accounted for by any of the record-armed tracks, the currently selected track will get it, even though you don't want it to. Alternatively, in DP if you don't explicitly assign a MIDI port to a MIDI track, then that MIDI will be ignored by DP. DP is much more explicit, clear, concise and predictable.

Its usually workable with some nutty environment stuff, but DP's approach is just way cleaner and explicit, handles large MIDI setups much much better. Logic works fine for a simple setup with one or two keyboards and without plugins that produce MIDI output, but as soon as you start tinkering with more elaborate MIDI routing, Logic turns into a headache and its hard to sometimes figure out what its doing because it has a lot of implicit behavior like I just described.

In Logic you set up ports yourself, in DP it grabs whatever you set up in the Audio MIDI Setup.
That, is the main difference there. The MIDI input set up in Logic allows you to either sum or set up ports for specific controllers etc. on a per output basis. Notice the terms Sum and Ports here:

One thing you're probably missing if you did mess around here, is you don't want to sum to the Sequencer Input if you want every controller to have it's own port. For extremely complex set ups, I would go as far as to say that Logic's flexibility here is better. There are entire old school style gate, velocity and CC step sequencers built in Logic's Environment. For day to day use DP is easier for sure, and if you're used to another DAW and have spent a couple weeks with Logic then it's really not that surprising you're convinced that it cannot separate MIDI by ports. In that same Logic window you can isolate any type of MIDI data and take it out of the stream. Had a synth that sent some CC that was messing with things that I isolated and took out of the stream. Once you get the signal path, it's not a nightmare. One confusing thing for people used to edit windows instead of the Environment is that there's two main areas where you set up your MIDI stream, the Sequencer Input and the MIDI Instrument set up:


Mostly, it's a matter of being used to a certain way of doing things. DP 15 years ago ticked me off for arbitrary reasons to me now, and I looked around for another DAW. Cubase and Logic were the choices at the time. Although Cubase was a lot closer to DP in terms of set up, I could see how fast you would eventually work in Logic, so I took the year or so it takes to fully get used to another DAW. I spent about 8 years using Logic, but one of the first things I did was really investigate how it set up MIDI for hardware synths and controllers. To be fair, Logic's approach was way more useful when FreeMIDI was what other DAWs used, MOTU had their own thing, and Apple had no Audio MIDI Set up, but it's for most purposes a similar concept, you set up ports to operate with certain hardware controllers, chain them, name them, and they're available in the DAW. Once it's done you set it as your template and it's always there in new songs etc. much like Bundles in DP.

[dewdman42]

You're still missing the point. The env can do lots of interesting things and yes you can have many input ports, but they still all have to funnel through a single sequencer port to get to any tracks for recording.

Yes the env is also a different way of doing things, sometimes clever and sometimes tedious for simple tasks, but you cannot wire yourself around this one basic limitation of logic, which is that there is only one funnel into the sequencer, and the sequencer itself has implicit behavior which conflates things easily.

[dewdman42]

And no you have it backwards, DP's MIDI routing is more flexible. The logic env is a creative place to make arps and faders and do some interesting things but most people don't use it for that, especially now with the new midifx. Mainly it's just for routing, and it's constrained in that way by the single sequencer port.

[Michael Canavan]

You're still missing the point. The env can do lots of interesting things and yes you can have many input ports, but they still all have to funnel through a single sequencer port to get to any tracks for recording.

Yes the env is also a different way of doing things, sometimes clever and sometimes tedious for simple tasks, but you cannot wire yourself around this one basic limitation of logic, which is that there is only one funnel into the sequencer, and the sequencer itself has implicit behavior which conflates things easily.

I'm pretty busy right now, tired etc. but you're actually missing something here, the Sequencer Input in the Environment is not summing the separated ports from the Physical input in the pic I posted earlier. The Sequencer input can be thought of as a representation of the Arrange page, or the Tracks Overview in DP. The reason you're thinking that Logic sums all incoming MIDI is because you haven't done what I've mentioned, disconnected the SUM cable that connects the Physical Input to the the Sequencer input. (look at the pic again if you haven't noticed that the Physical Input is connected with only the SUM going to the Sequencer Input) Once you do that you do not have MIDI summed. you then connect any available ports you want to use to the sequencer input and they are available as separate ports in Logic. I set up five or six different controllers controlling different soft synths and hardware in Logic with no issues, and if there was an errant MIDI glitch you can get rid of it before it reaches the Sequencer input, or on a per port basis.

Like I said, I'm a DP fan, but Logic has some distinct advantages MIDI wise, MMC in DP is controlled by physical MOTU MIDI interfaces, and every controller keyboard like Arturia, AKAI etc. that uses MMC to send transport messages to DP is rendered useless that way. There's nothing quite like the Environment in DP that can get around this. So a user who first discovers DP who may have used Logic or Cubase etc. will try to set up a split keyboard in DP to control two soft synths in different ranges on the keyboard and use the transport controls with no luck at all.

Yes setting up multiple MIDI inputs on their own ports is much easier to do in DP, but MIDI IMO in no way is Logics weak point, but it's not elegant for sure.

[Shooshie]

So a user who first discovers DP who may have used Logic or Cubase etc. will try to set up a split keyboard in DP to control two soft synths in different ranges on the keyboard and use the transport controls with no luck at all.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but I've done this many times. What's supposed to not work? I've got such setups saved for quick return to them.

I must be missing something, because that sentence just doesn't make sense to me.

Shoosh

[dewdman42]

disconnected the SUM cable that connects the Physical Input to the the Sequencer input. (look at the pic again if you haven't noticed that the Physical Input is connected with only the SUM going to the Sequencer Input) Once you do that you do not have MIDI summed. you then connect any available ports you want to use to the sequencer input and they are available as separate ports in Logic.

I will try that later when I get a chance. This is not explained in the manual. If this is true what you say then the env sequencer port is not really a port per say... But I will definitely try that, thanks for that explanation. Except I did actually try routing some of the other ports to it and basically end up with kaotic results...so...we'll see.

Yes setting up multiple MIDI inputs on their own ports is much easier to do in DP, but MIDI IMO in no way is Logics weak point, but it's not elegant for sure.

fair enough

[dewdman42]

Once you do that you do not have MIDI summed. you then connect any available ports you want to use to the sequencer input and they are available as separate ports in Logic.

I tried this. With the SUM port disconnected and several other specific ports cabled to the sequencer port...I go to the arrange window and select a track and showing the track inspector I can see no way to specify which port to use for recording to that track. I can set the MIDI channel only. I see you're on Logic9, maybe this is not a feature in LogicX anymore? Or maybe there is some way that is not obvious to set the port?

I'm going back to my original statements in the meantime

[nk_e]

I am learning a lot about DP and Logic in this discussion. Much appreciated guys!

[bayswater]

Once you do that you do not have MIDI summed. you then connect any available ports you want to use to the sequencer input and they are available as separate ports in Logic.

I tried this. With the SUM port disconnected and several other specific ports cabled to the sequencer port...I go to the arrange window and select a track and showing the track inspector I can see no way to specify which port to use for recording to that track. I can set the MIDI channel only. I see you're on Logic9, maybe this is not a feature in LogicX anymore? Or maybe there is some way that is not obvious to set the port?

I'm going back to my original statements in the meantime

How about this? (I can only try it on my laptop at the moment and have no controllers attached so don't know if it works)
Go to the environment mixer page and pick an instrument there (you have to add the instrument in the arrange page. Illogic will not allow you to add an instrument object in the place it actually exists). Add a physical input to this page. Draw a cable from one of the ports other than the sum to that instrument. Add a sequencer input. Draw a cable from the instrument to the sequencer input.

I suspect there is a way for Logic to do this. The people at LUG could probably tell you how.

[dewdman42]

bayswater I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish with that.

But mixer objects in the environment do not out the MIDI from plugins contained therein. If any MIDI is output from a mixer object, I believe it would be the movement of faders and knobs on the mixer. As of now, Logic does not take MIDI output from AU's... This is why most plugins which output any kind of MIDI have had to resort to using IAC as a loopback mechanism as a workaround for Logic users.

Some of them recently updated their AU's to compile also a AU-MIDIFX version of their plugin. In that case, the midifx slot of Logic *WILL* output MIDI (YAY!), but the drag is that the MIDI plugin slot in Logic is after the track record stage...so...its back to the same problem. You could put a MIDI plugin on an external track and send it to IAC and loopback, that's about it.