MOTUnation.com

When people talk about motu being a small company, you have to realize apple was at one point too. the main reason besides the product line is the marketing they employed that has allowed them to grow as much as they have and provide the type of innovation, and "perceived" value of their products, and you can conclude either two things. either apple will continue this conquest, with no way for motu to compete, as such their demise is eminent, or they are going to have to add more bang for the buck, even if it wouldn••™t be feasible for them to include all there product in one package, this is a consumers market. Motu better understand that, if not I••™ll give it five years before they move to making only hardware.

MIDI Life Crisis wrote: Would that depend on the performance and sounds of the VIs? As perviously noted, L8 looks and acts alot like Garage Band. I've run GB once or twice and deleted it. That interface did nothing for me.

Just for fun I pulled out GB 3 last night ( I bought iLife '08 when it came out, highly recommend the new iPhoto btw) and it runs beautifully on my G5. Getting VI's running is a breeze, and the loop library is really intuitive. The spotlight style searching is great. Getting music into my machine couldn't be simpler. That said, not a whole lot or real "work" can be done in the program, as the editing/mixing/customization just isn't there. I view it mainly as the successor to the analog 4-track, and plan on using it again as a sketchpad of sorts. It even has a staff view and a chord identifier. Pretty neat for a toy.

All in all though, it was the responsiveness of the interface I liked the best. I wonder if L8 is optimized like this?

DP4.61+ is such a deep program...there are often 3-5 different ways of doing the same thing...I tend to like this quality in a program. In GB there is usually only one way to do anything, which while maybe more intuitive, is altogether very limiting. I imagine L8 is a quite the step up.

OT, but does L8, or any other DAW for that matter have anything like DP's clippings?

MIDI Life Crisis wrote:

Shooshie wrote:Ah, we're all making too big a deal out of this. Yes, the industry changed... Shooshie

Would that depend on the performance and sounds of the VIs? As perviously noted, L8 looks and acts alot like Garage Band. I've run GB once or twice and deleted it. That interface did nothing for me.

Granted, I may get L8 for some features, but DP is my workhorse for the next few years (at least).

My similar experience and sentiments on the matter.

jlaudon wrote:BTW, anyone know what Rihanna's CD was done with (I listen for reference, not really for enjoyment? Was it Logic? The bottom end and lo mids seem to be muddy on my car stereo (with the 12" sub - it's not my stereo -lots of other music, electronic, rock, etc. sounds great on it)

I don't know what Rihanna's cd was done with, but that wouldn't matter. That's whoever the mix engineer was fault. And I doubt that they would mix it completly inside the box and not use any outboard gear, though I could be wrong (considering that now days people are dumbing down production), but still....whoever engineered the mix or mastering would be to blame and not the DAW.

jlaudon wrote:BTW, anyone know what Rihanna's CD was done with (I listen for reference, not really for enjoyment? Was it Logic? The bottom end and lo mids seem to be muddy on my car stereo (with the 12" sub - it's not my stereo -lots of other music, electronic, rock, etc. sounds great on it)

The one album I know of off the top of my head recorded in Logic is New Order's "Get Ready" (the one with Crystal.) You can hear the muddy lows throughout the whole thing. Definitely not one of their finer albums, sadly.

Emagic's website used to have a bunch of artists listed, but emagic.de now just kicks you to Apple's website anymore. You can find some artists in the News sections there that are listed as Logic users, but you have to poke around.

Remote Control

Use an Apple Remote to control Logic Pro from a distance, with the ability to play, stop, record, rewind, fast-forward, and move to the next or previous track.

Frozen tracks play anywhere

Freeze Tracks provides an easy way to play large projects on less powerful systems or on computers that do not have the original project plug-ins installed.

That's pretty cool.

something else that's pretty cool: they include a demo dvd which has 4 complete projects by various artists...done completely in logic.
shiny toy guns' "le disko" has both stereo and surround versions, with the video window open (showing the video, of course). so you can dork around with a couple tunes, or even just look and see how they were put together, etc, and of course, it's all in sync with the video.
it's a really cool little novelty, imo...and i get a kick out of seeing how they put that song together and how it's mixed.
so far, i'm not so sure how i feel about the interface, but i've only just installed it and haven't really done much yet.

The only things I would be interested in hearing about with L8 compared to DP are:

Latency settings required on big sessions
Monitoring functionality including DM
Sound after comps
End mix results using their plugs, echo etc.

OldTimey wrote:Just for fun I pulled out GB 3 last night ( I bought iLife '08 when it came out, highly recommend the new iPhoto btw) and it runs beautifully on my G5. Getting VI's running is a breeze, and the loop library is really intuitive.

<snip>

All in all though, it was the responsiveness of the interface I liked the best. I wonder if L8 is optimized like this?

OldTimey -- this is the issue for me

I agree -- Garageband is ***extremely*** intuitive.

However Logic Pro 7 is extremely un-intuitive, at least to me.

I have always described making music in logic this way -- for me, compared to DP, Logic is like using a Powerdrill to hammer in a nail.

The UI is a mess, it takes several steps to do things which take only one step to do in DP.

That being said, the claims for Logic 8 is that Apple has fixed that mess and improved the UI.

Have they? The PDF on changes in Logic 8 sounds as if they have fixed a number of things that used to confuse and annoy me.

I guess I will have to spring for the upgrade and find out.

--

James Steele wrote:One feature that I saw mentioned somewhere that would be cool if MOTU could do it, was I guess Logic can patch in external hardware effects and compensate for latency. Is this right? It would be a cool trick to patch in my hardware boxes on track inserts and have it work as if it were a plug.

I use a V-rack full of Auxes for sends and returns for that, all pre-patched from the analog ins and outs of my 2408mk3 to a bunch of outboard gear. Two are 'floating' and can be used with any one of my guitar pedals, the rest are patched into the outboard gear I use the most. Throw a latency fixer on the sends and you're set. You do have to print, but that's advisable anyway, to ensure recall ability.

from what i can tell from a little bit of noodling with it, it's much more intuitive than l7 was. some things are similar, but by and large, it does seem much simpler. their implementation of consolidated windows is pretty cool, too.
for instance, you can select an audio track (and it resizes itself a little larger to stand out. then you can select hyperedit as a "drawer" that comes up from the bottom of the screen, and here you can edit your automation curves, etc...it's pretty nice. double click the audio channel, or just re-click the hyperedit button, and the drawer hides again...
again, this is just me tinkering. the manual hasn't even come out of the box yet.
also, you can close the video window, and the video shows up at the top of the inspector (channelstrip, etc) on the left. it's pretty slick. you can just click the pulldown arrow, and that thumbnail video goes away altogether (until you click the arrow again, of course).
the mixer is likewise a drawer that comes up from the bottom, and you can view "single" (only the applicable channels, i.e. audio 1, output 1-2, master), "arrangement" (all of the channels used in the arrangement), or "all" which, of course, shows everything. you can resize the drawers to take up more or less of the screen real-estate as you desire.
there are a LOT of options presented as pulldowns on each drawer.
oh, and you can choose between light, dark or your own custom color for the arrangement background. the MIDI editor view option allows you to choose light or dark standard themes, or you can assign custom colors to the natural and sharp/flat keys.
can't vouch for the sound per se yet, as i'm not at home with the monitors, but...as the weekend progresses, i'll hit you with more findings.
there is a master volume control in the transport bar, but i haven't found a position slider control yet...

kell

As I'm reading manuals, posts etc. for the same reasons as everybody here (will I have to learn Logic now that they are taking over the world?), I'm actually dumbfounded at how far behind Logic actually was in so many crucial areas:

IN LOGIC 8

•••You can now edit audio in the arrange window. Whoop-dee-doo.
•••You now have a consolidated window. Whoop-dee-doo.
•••You can now select busses as inputs. Whoop-dee-doo. (That one made me laugh.)
•••PDC (our ADC) now *almost* works. But if you select PDC to apply to all, this is what apparently happens (taken from a thread on Bigbluelounge):

In LP7, put PDC to 'ALL', and start mixing a track - send loads of stuff to busses. Add a load of plugins everywhere, including on the busses, that have a lot of latency. Everything will play back fine and in sync beacuse logic is compensating for the delay.

But now try to record a new audio track with no plugs on, just an audio track.

Once it's recorded, logic will place it out of time, by the delay offset.

LP8 has a low latency mode with which you can set your own latency limit (i.e. 5ms) and Logic will automatically bypass any plugs which would take the latency above that limit. There's a button in the transport allowing easy access to this.

It in effect does what i used to do manually... set plug-in delay to instruments and audio tracks and bypass all the plug-ins on busses and outputs.

Not perfect but a lot easier.

What the heck?

As I posted in that same thread on BBL, I'm sure this release will cement the dominance of Logic in the Mac DAW world, since Apple (which is turning into the Microsoft of the media world) will muscle it so - who can compete with a $500 price for a $2000 package of software? But if that indeed happens, it seems at least a little like the win of VHS over Beta to me. For now, DP rocks on my G5, and now more than ever I hope that MOTU will make sure DP continues to be around as the superior DAW.

L8 limitations:
No beat detective? That would be a deal-killer for some studios.
Graphic time-stretch/compress is clunky in L8. For someone who does music with real instruments and vocals, graphic time-stretch is a must-have.

Of course, these are sophisticated features that are only important to certain users. It's these certain users who will probably stick with DP. Perhaps if DP implements the new comping feature in L8, and includes some more VI's, they could stay competitive.

The one big positive for me with DP is stability. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I can go weeks at a time, working every day, and not crash.

I'll probably get L8 after the bugs are worked out, but I'll proabably aslo get the next incarnation of DP. It's the grass is greener thing. There will always be better tools. You have to weigh the benefit of better tools with the drawback of a new learning curve and the limitations that come with the so-called 'better' tools. In the end, it's the work you do that matters, and if you become a slave to whatever the latest and greatest tool is, your work becomes secondary to the great tool chase.

true, that. but there are 3rd party options for timestretch/pitchshift that integrate directly into logic (izotope radius is one) that weren't/aren't available to other daws. a lot of 3rd parties seem to come to the rescue of logic shortcomings (i.e. redmatic's exs24 programmer thingie). i'm not sure if i find that encouraging or disturbing, really...
one thing that bothers me about logic's time stretch in the arrange (which is nearly as simple as dp's now) is that apparently, it's a destructive process...

James Steele wrote:I would indeed though like to see a larger font in the track overview also as I now have a 30" monitor and I can see a lot more, but the 9pt Geneva is a pain. I'll have to start using my Cntrl + Scroll Wheel zooming thing more.

In a two monitor setup, this is not a problem. You just set one monitor with a lower resolution (larger image) and drag the track window there, but it would be nice if DP addressed this in the next version. Isn't the track window in L8 scaleable? Those rascals!