Digital Performer Vs Logic Pro X

[Shooshie]

MOTU is worth it; they seem to care for and support their customers and they keep their code stable. This is demonstrated well by the big plus that DP9 will run fine on both of my Macs, while Logic wouldn't.

Microsoft's apps certainly won't open their old files. MS Word first broke its format in about 1998 or 1999. It's broken it at least one time since then, too. If you stored your novel in MS Word in 1988, good luck ever getting it back. ...

Shooshie

Actually, Microsoft snuck that feature back into Word 2011. It will open the oldest files by selecting "Recover text from any file" and formatting usually stays intact unless you used Fast Save back then.

I've seen and used that feature, or tried to use it, many times. Doesn't work. I don't know if there is a date range or what, but my old MS Word files just don't open in it. Those range from 1985 to 1994 or so. I don't recall fast save existing back then.

What I have to do is open them with FileJuicer. The resulting text is full of crap that has to be deleted the hard way, and there is no formatting, but at least the thoughts that were mine are still there. Microsoft's "Recover any file" doesn't.

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Funny I just was talking to a good friend who worked there for about 15 years and we discussed last night briefly Apple's slash and burn policy. One of their internal mottos was "If we don't make our products obsolete someone else will." Methinks they took that too far for sure.

Methinks Apple struck stupid when they drilled for that motto.

Shoosh

[nk_e]

Of course, the worst major offender is Apple. Nothing opens AppleWorks, MacPaint, MacWrite or ClarisDraw? Huh?

There's a reason I still keep a G4 that dual boots OS 9 / 10.4.11.

Funny I just was talking to a good friend who worked there for about 15 years and we discussed last night briefly Apple's slash and burn policy. One of their internal mottos was "If we don't make our products obsolete someone else will." Methinks they took that too far for sure.

The only real reason I'm getting Logic at some point here is because Logic 8 for me required their XSkey USB dongle to authorize the first time you open it up after installing. Now to run it at all on Yosemite I have to plug in the XSKey and type in the 20 odd digit serial number every time I open it. Apparently I'm lucky because most people can't get it to run at all on Yosemite.

You might be pleasantly surprised. There's big differences between Logic 8 and Logic X....

[mikehalloran]

What version of Logic 8 used a dongle? My copy of Logic Studio 8 never had a one -- I still have that 11 lb brick sitting on a shelf (I weight it). Logic Pro X opens all those files and GarageBand which is why I have it.

Fast Save was an option in old versions of Word. You enabled it if you didn't like the glacial pace at which Word saved normally. Office 2004 was the last version that could open those files cleanly. I think that stopped working after 10.6 with Rosetta. I have a copy of that on my G4 but I have tried my 5.1a files in Word 2011 and I can open them -- Word 2008 won't.

[cleamon]

Of course, the worst major offender is Apple. Nothing opens AppleWorks, MacPaint, MacWrite or ClarisDraw? Huh?

There's a reason I still keep a G4 that dual boots OS 9 / 10.4.11.

Funny I just was talking to a good friend who worked there for about 15 years and we discussed last night briefly Apple's slash and burn policy. One of their internal mottos was "If we don't make our products obsolete someone else will." Methinks they took that too far for sure.

The only real reason I'm getting Logic at some point here is because Logic 8 for me required their XSkey USB dongle to authorize the first time you open it up after installing. Now to run it at all on Yosemite I have to plug in the XSKey and type in the 20 odd digit serial number every time I open it. Apparently I'm lucky because most people can't get it to run at all on Yosemite.

Learned my lesson. I spent about 2 weeks cobbling together a system to run a very old application so I could retrieve the MIDI data from a file. Dos 6.x, a machine that could run it, hardware interface (the app required it), a copy of the app on a compatible media (5 1/4" floppy), and on and on. Could not use a VM since the HW interface was not virtualized. All so I could load a proprietary format file, and do a "save as standard MIDI" ( or export to std. MIDI).
Moral of the story is that now, I routinely save files in (the most likely) standard format as a backup procedure. This not only applies to daw projects, but video, audio, photography, etc. You never know what apps will be around, or will run on modern equipment in 15-20 years.

[nk_e]

Of course, the worst major offender is Apple. Nothing opens AppleWorks, MacPaint, MacWrite or ClarisDraw? Huh?

There's a reason I still keep a G4 that dual boots OS 9 / 10.4.11.

Funny I just was talking to a good friend who worked there for about 15 years and we discussed last night briefly Apple's slash and burn policy. One of their internal mottos was "If we don't make our products obsolete someone else will." Methinks they took that too far for sure.

The only real reason I'm getting Logic at some point here is because Logic 8 for me required their XSkey USB dongle to authorize the first time you open it up after installing. Now to run it at all on Yosemite I have to plug in the XSKey and type in the 20 odd digit serial number every time I open it. Apparently I'm lucky because most people can't get it to run at all on Yosemite.

Learned my lesson. I spent about 2 weeks cobbling together a system to run a very old application so I could retrieve the MIDI data from a file. Dos 6.x, a machine that could run it, hardware interface (the app required it), a copy of the app on a compatible media (5 1/4" floppy), and on and on. Could not use a VM since the HW interface was not virtualized. All so I could load a proprietary format file, and do a "save as standard MIDI" ( or export to std. MIDI).
Moral of the story is that now, I routinely save files in (the most likely) standard format as a backup procedure. This not only applies to daw projects, but video, audio, photography, etc. You never know what apps will be around, or will run on modern equipment in 15-20 years.

Excellent advice.

[daniel.sneed]

Just my 2 cents:
In case of a total wreck, which I hope never comes, music may go on with DP running on a mid-cheap PC, while Logic will need a Mac. He, he...

[bayswater]

What version of Logic 8 used a dongle? My copy of Logic Studio 8 never had a one -- I still have that 11 lb brick sitting on a shelf (I weight it). Logic Pro X opens all those files and GarageBand which is why I have it.

If you arrived at Logic 8 using upgrades from a version that used the dongle, you had to use it once to authorized while entering the old and the new serial numbers. After that, you could put it away.

[Michael Canavan]

What version of Logic 8 used a dongle? My copy of Logic Studio 8 never had a one -- I still have that 11 lb brick sitting on a shelf (I weight it). Logic Pro X opens all those files and GarageBand which is why I have it.

If you arrived at Logic 8 using upgrades from a version that used the dongle, you had to use it once to authorized while entering the old and the new serial numbers. After that, you could put it away.

Yep, bought Logic at version 4 right before Apple bought Emagic. Logic 8 was the first version without a dongle.

[dewdman42]

I spent the last week or two trying to put Logic through some paces. One thing about Logic that was glaringly difficult to work with was the MIDI routing. Notwithstanding the clever "environment" where you can cable MIDI pipes together and channelize and do fancy things like that, there is one glaring limitation of Logic that is a major hurdle: All incoming MIDI that is headed to the sequencer, has to funnel through a single internal MIDI port.

This is very much different then DP where each MIDI track can specify exactly the port and channel that it will be listening to for MIDI data. In DP its very straightforward to choose whichever MIDI port and ch you want and have that go to the MIDI track you have in mind.

In logic, everything comes in and basically goes to through one single internal MIDI sequencer port. Then in the Logic track window, whichever track you have selected gets ALL of the incoming MIDI. selecting the track is how you record-arm it. This gets problematic when you're using MIDI generators of any kind where you will have more than one at a time pumping MIDI through MIDI routing matrix.

Logic does have a multi-record mode, set in prefs. Ok, so you set that and then you can at least have each track decide which channel to pay attention to, but its still all the MIDI coming through one single funnel port to get to the several tracks..and worse yet...Logic is programmed so that every MIDI event has to be received somewhere. So basically let's say you have MIDI coming in channels 1,2,3 and you have one track configured to listen to ch1 and another track configured to listen to ch2. You want to ignore ch3 for now. However, Logic will take the ch3 data and send it to the currently selected track anyway, as a fail over.

It gets quite confusing with more elaborate MIDI setups, to keep track of what MIDI is going from where to where and what the heck is being recorded on a particular track, etc..not to mention it will probably involve some brainiac futzing around with the environment cables, which is capable, but not convenient.

The MIDI routing on Logic is touted as being really powerful, and indeed some interesting things can be done in the environment, but your basic routing of MIDI events between plugins is basically a total PITA and the single MIDI funnel into the sequencer makes it really difficult to keep track of it all.

Sorry, but DP wins on that front HANDS DOWN. I spent a good solid 10 hours doing nothing but fiddling around with the environment, trying to figure out the best way to handle Jamstix in Logic..and never really got it 100%, though I did consider myself a somewhat crafty environment engineer by the end of it. I came back to DP and replicated a MIDI route within minutes that was cleaner, easier to understand and actually worked better because no MIDI funnel into the sequencer. So yes, DP is way better then Logic for MIDI routing, I don't care what they all try to say about the environment, its got certain capabilities none of us need and makes the tasks we typically need to do..... way harder.

One thing Logic has beat over DP in the MIDI department are the MIDI FX plugin slots, and their MIDI Fx are actually quite nice. However, be advised, that the MIDI FX slot is AFTER recording to the track so you can't record the output of a MIDI FX directly to a track, you have to loopback through IAC or something. Meanwhile on DP, you can capture the MIDI out from any VST and send it to any MIDI track you want and record it right there, no IAC needed. There are VST plugins out there that do most of the stuff the Logic MIDIFX can do. I wish DP had a scriptable MIDI plugin, but there are 3rd party solutions for this (BlueCat Audio).

Logic's drum mapping capabilities are much easier to deal with then DP. That's one of those things DP has been needing to fix for a long time.

I found it very easy to cause Logic to overload the CPU and halt playback with a dialog saying audio had to halt. DP at least has an option to ignore those errors and keep playing even if their are dropouts, which a lot of the time is perfectly fine. Final bounces are going to be non-real time anyway. I ran into problems with not all that many plugins, where Logic would repeatedly stop playback to tell me the sample rate of the project doesn't match the sample rate of my built in sound card. Huh? Then why was it playing perfectly fine? Bugs and poor design that has not been resolved in who knows how long.

Routing of audio in DP is also superb. The ability to have plugins on a V rack and route the MIDI and audio from there to tracks to record on...totally awesome. The logic environment can route MIDI, it does not route audio.

I do like Logic's piano roll better, but I'm not a DP piano roll guru to comment about functionally either of them can do. I just like the way it looks on Logic. IT FEELS nicer to me. I don't like the way DP's looks. It irks me. Not sure why exactly. I also like the way Logic's regions seem to line up on bar boundaries better. while the regions in DP seem just kind of random the way they outline the notes, with the region boundaries having no musical significant whatsoever. So in logic its super easy to end up with bar-dilineated regions that can easily be looped, aliased, copy and pasted, dragged around, etc...in a musical way...whereas DP's regions feel like just meter-less regions of notes with no musical timing meaning to them. I find Logic's ability to slap bits of audio or MIDI into the arrangement window and loop them out or whtaever, very easy and intuitive and musical..more like Live and Bitwig, Project5 and others... I feel DP loses on that front.

If I had to try to label things, I would call Logic a musicians dream and an engineer's nightmare and DP the other way around, though in both cases, neither one is truly a nightmare. but I just think DP has really thought though many engineering issues and provided solutions and a clean tracking environement, while they've kind of gotten long in the tooth in the music writing and composing area of the product. DP is not as innovative in terms of providing tools to create music with. Its all there, you can do it, but its not as musically intuitive is all. Logic has incredible drummer modeling, beat makers, loopifiers, an incredible collection of soft instruments, a huge library of preset sound libraries and loops, etc. Well most of us that are serious don't use those loops, but the thing is they designed the program in a way to make it EASY to use those loops and tools and that makes Logic more musically intuitive for the music creation process.... I personally just find it really easy to start playing and editing away...its all right there conveniently presented and easy to get to the stuff I need to get to for recording an idea and tweaking it. I find DP more cumbersome, especially when looping of any kind is involved. On the other hand DP is WAY better then Logic in terms of audio and MIDI engineering, setting up mixes, routing stuff around and facilitating things that way. I feel DP is more reliable and bug free. I feel Logic has a LOT of gotchas when it comes to routing MIDI and audio around, dealing with song parts, things that are typically easy with DP chunks and vracks, etc.

Logic is cheap, doesn't cost much to have it around, but honestly..I'm back where i started with DP... My short little foray with Logic was exciting at the prospect, but in the end had too much technical glitches. I can see where simpler productions would do well with it, pretty straightforward and many sounds come with it. In 1982 I paid a hell of a lot more than the price of Logic for a porta studio, which didn't do 0.001% of what Logic can do. The kids today don't know how good they have it.

[mhschmieder]

I could swear that before I upgraded to Yosemite, I was able to find where Logic hid VI's, but after more than half an hour this past weekend I gave up and moved on; no matter which technique I used, I could only find its internal instruments.

Maybe I'll bother to try to figure this out again on another day, if I come across a plug-in that DP can't handle but Logic can.

Unlikely though -- I have a lot of DAW's and two-track so-called "mastering" apps by now, and DP is MILES ahead of ANY of them when it comes to plug-in validation and plug-in stability.

[Shooshie]

I do like Logic's piano roll better, but I'm not a DP piano roll guru to comment about functionally either of them can do. I just like the way it looks on Logic. IT FEELS nicer to me. I don't like the way DP's looks. It irks me. Not sure why exactly. I also like the way Logic's regions seem to line up on bar boundaries better. while the regions in DP seem just kind of random the way they outline the notes, with the region boundaries having no musical significant whatsoever. So in logic its super easy to end up with bar-dilineated regions that can easily be looped, aliased, copy and pasted, dragged around, etc...in a musical way...whereas DP's regions feel like just meter-less regions of notes with no musical timing meaning to them. I find Logic's ability to slap bits of audio or MIDI into the arrangement window and loop them out or whtaever, very easy and intuitive and musical..more like Live and Bitwig, Project5 and others... I feel DP loses on that front.

If I had to try to label things, I would call Logic a musicians dream and an engineer's nightmare and DP the other way around, though in both cases, neither one is truly a nightmare. but I just think DP has really thought though many engineering issues and provided solutions and a clean tracking environement, while they've kind of gotten long in the tooth in the music writing and composing area of the product. DP is not as innovative in terms of providing tools to create music with. Its all there, you can do it, but its not as musically intuitive is all.

I appreciate all the time you spent both in trying Logic and comparing it to DP, as well as in writing it all down for us. That's good conversation whether I agree or disagree with the quote above. Of course, I wouldn't be prefacing it this way if I totally agreed. Back in Logic 8 Studio, I spent the better part of a year going back and forth between DP and Logic, trying my best to get up to speed in Logic as regards MIDI recording, composition, and editing. I had to conclude that Logic was designed by people who never really understood the musician's needs or ways of working creatively. People say it's better now than it was then; I wouldn't know about that. But as of Logic 8, it did not hold a candle to DP's MIDI workflows, other than in working with pre-recorded loops. (which I never use)

The Regions in DP are not as powerful or convenient as those in Logic, but for the most part I work with selections rather than regions. However, it DOES get a bad rap. People rarely pay close attention to the region parsing preferences in DP. It's a two-part thing. If the region is longer than X beats, you have it parse them into regions of Y beats in length. That's not as useless as everyone makes it out to be. You have to play around with both X and Y to see what offers you some functionality.

You did not mention the Tracks Overview Window in DP. It has no analog in Logic, and is one of DP's greatest strengths. If you learned DP back before the Tracks Overview window (graphic interface) existed, your workflow evolved with that window. In the early 1990s, it did not even show you any notes, just shades of gray to indicate how much MIDI activity was in each cell. But you learned that by changing the resolution of the window, you could work wickedly fast moving bars around, or partial bars, or beats (all in the resolution). That capability is still there today. It's in learning the keyboard commands, setting up some that help you out, and learning the differences between range and event selection, and how to use them.

The piano roll in Logic seemed too coarse for me. I like DP's, which I can set for any resolution, and with which the controllers for the active track are always visible and aligned with the notes, or easily filtered with Quickfilter. Logic makes you jump through hoops to do that. The DP MIDI drawing tools are infinitely superior than Logic's, IMO. Again, it's about learning, setting up and using keyboard shortcuts. The SOLO command in the MIDI Edit Window enables you to click a track and hear it or any combination of tracks made visible in the window. That's quick setup for hearing what you're working on, comparing it with other tracks, etc.

I made my living for over 20 years with MIDI, and added audio to my work when it became available natively on the Mac. But for at least 15 years, MIDI was my bread and butter. I worked fast, and could create expressive scores very quickly. "Expressive" is the keyword there. Logic defied me to be expressive. It was so much damn work in Logic to create expressive lines during the editing and mixing stages that I finally just pushed it aside and decided DP was always going to be my main axe, period.

Everyone has their own ways of working, and if Logic fits someone, I'm not going to criticize them for it. But I'm an old-school composer and arranger with very fine performance skills as well, and for me, DP was the only real way to get anywhere. It's just a matter of keeping the score in your head so you always know where you are, and learning to work with selections rather than regions. Selections can do anything. Regions (in Logic) tie your hands more often than they help. It's the "group" that wouldn't go away! I mean, groupings are nice, but usually I'm not editing the group. I'm editing the contents of that group. Regions are just in the way, then. Selections can be made quickly and held for long periods as you work. Much better for me. But that's just me. When I want to move the region, I go to the Tracks Overview Window and work with it. It's still DP's best-kept secret, and a powerful, fast window for editing and doing all kinds of work from hands-on data moving and selection to utility work for I/O, track naming, record enabling, song building, large structural changes, drag & drop sections to/from chunks or Finder, and much, much more.

I could write a book about MIDI in DP, and if you took the many posts i've made here on the subject, I'm sure they could be turned into a book, but I won't do that tonight. Suffice to conclude that working with MIDI in DP is one of those things that makes me pinch myself to see if I'm dreaming, because it's exciting and fun. I still can't believe I made a career of it. I was a performer who thought that MIDI would make it easier for me to transcribe, edit, and transpose scores. Suddenly I found other people offering me too much money to refuse if I did those things for them, too. I tried a few other platforms over the years, but they just didn't have the depth of DP, housed within clean lines and clear functions, with the ease of use.

Shooshie

[Michael Canavan]

Although I'm a DP guy, the fact is every piece of software out there including DP, has limitations and areas where other software just get it 'right'. Logic's MIDI isn't that much different than DP's the truth is all MIDI data enters into the computer as a single stream, Logic just exposes that. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

[bayswater]

I'd have to agree with most of these observations on Logic, but these are not why I use DP. It's the workflow. As features have been added to Logic, they seem to have be hastily tacked on wherever, and when Logic is updated, there can be dozens of small changes that are arguably improvement, but they are disruptive. You still have to go into the ancient Environment to get some things done in MIDI.

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.

In DP, new features are better thought through and work in way that you might expect as a DP user. The only big exception for me is drums: Logic has tools for drums that fit into the overall DAW. DP's need an overhaul. I bet Logic is much better than DP for loop based fixed tempo songs that use pre-processed clips, but I don't do any of that, and I suspect you could do it just as well in GarageBand.

I like to try out other DAWs because I learn something with every one of them that I can take back to DP. I've managed to do a song end to end in maybe 15-20 DAWs that run on a Mac -- but not Logic; I always get frustrated and abandon it. It's in my list of things to do before I die -- finish a song in Logic.

[Michael Canavan]

I bet Logic is much better than DP for loop based fixed tempo songs that use pre-processed clips, but I don't do any of that, and I suspect you could do it just as well in GarageBand.

Sure Apple Loops is natively supported, whereas it's more like DP can read them. Honestly Logic is better at looping in general. All the talk about how difficult Logic is in this or that area, the looping function and tools for doing it in Logic are IMO much more intuitive and better laid out than in DP.
For instance I though there was a way in DP for instance to print loops to real MIDI, but I haven't found it. It's not that DP's looping is bad, just way more steps, and some things are big What the heck? moments. 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.