Review: Apple Logic Pro 9
Apple’s new Logic Pro has the ability to pull audio files into any shape imaginable.
By Brad Watts
2 September 2009
This has been a hotly anticipated upgrade, albeit not surrounded in the hype and suspense that accompanied the release of Logic Studio (v1) and the incumbent Logic Pro 8. At the heart of Logic Studio 2 lies the focus of this review: an upgraded and reinvigorated Logic Pro – now sporting the number 9 Guernsey.
Logic Pro is, needless to say, the primary reason why people buy Logic Studio, and the primary focus of this review. The DAW and sequencing program, initially developed by Emagic in Germany, was acquired by Apple way back in 2002 to lead its charge into the professional world of music composition and editing. Logic Pro is now a fully-fledged member of Apple’s Pro Applications lineage, but the application hasn’t always had its plumage in such preened condition. Version 7 was Apple’s first attempt to assimilate the application into the grey-on-grey aesthetic of the company’s other white-collar applications, and was, in all reality, little more than a costume change. In terms of features, the application seemed much the same as v6.
The next installment, Logic Pro 8, promised a lot, and did arrive with a truckload of revolutionary features, including a streamlined, single-window working environment that went a long way toward simplifying what has always been a complex application. With v8, Apple had time to shape Logic Pro’s internals to offer a vastly more consolidated workflow. This won the application plenty of new friends, as did discontinuing the XS-Key copy protection.
But for many users of v7, Logic Pro 8 wasn’t the step forward it was promised to be. For some, the departure from established working methods accrued over seven iterations of the program was a little too much to bear, and there are many who still work within the so-called ‘confines’ of Logic Pro 7. To be frank, I wasn’t a big fan of v8 either, mainly because I was using it with Digidesign HD hardware, and the two historically harmonious bedfellows were starting to get a bit cranky with one another. More importantly, Logic, in all its guises, is a much happier camper when running in what’s termed ‘Universal Track Mode’. That is: using interleaved stereo files. These aspects rendered Logic Pro 8 a precarious platform for me, and I too eventually reverted to v7 for both stability and familiarity’s sake.
That said, there are plenty of Logic Pro 8 users out there that are extremely happy with its performance, and I’ve no doubt I’m one of the last to depart the sinking ship that is the Digidesign HD/Logic Pro platform. Yes, that’s right, I’m ditching the Digidesign HD hardware.
As I mentioned in my last Mac Audio column, I’ve been flitting between ProTools 8 and Logic Pro 8 for some time now, never feeling all that settled. Things would have been easier for me if ProTools had been able to read interleaved stereo audio files without converting them to split stereo files, or if Logic Pro had been able to perform all its tricks with split stereo files. But I was daydreaming if I thought either of these wishes was likely to eventuate, and perhaps I should never have persevered with such a rig. But I’ve always loved the fact that latency was never an issue with the HD hardware. Incidentally, there’s now a millisecond latency value displayed in the audio preferences of v9, making it much easier to compensate for the inherent native latency issues.
This point aside, the main problem with my Logic Pro/Digidesign HD time-trap was transferring projects between this system and the Logic systems of those I worked with – the process often became more trouble than it was worth. Plus, there were just so many functions in Logic Pro that wouldn’t function under the Digidesign HD command. So, as mentioned, the time came for me to bid Digidesign HD hardware adieu.
THE PLAYING FIELD
So, to keep you abreast of the system I’ve settled on, and to give you an idea of the systems on which I’ve been running Logic Pro 9, here are the current Apple computers I’m running. First up is my ‘work’ machine: a 2.4GHz MacBook with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive running OSX 10.5.8. The audio interface I’m using is either a MOTU 828mk2, a Digidesign M-Box Micro, or whichever Firewire or USB audio interface I’m reviewing at the time. This is a supported system, according to Apple, and it meets the minimum requirements as posted on the Logic Studio web pages at www.apple.com. Those prerequisites include an Intel processor, 1GB of RAM, OSX 10.5.7 or later, and QuickTime 7.6 or later – all easily attainable stipulations for an Apple laptop released a little over a year ago.
The other machine is my primary recording and mixing machine: an older, recently bequeathed dual 2GHz G5 running an RME HDSP 9652, a couple of ADAT eight-channel I/O units and a Universal Audio UAD-1 card. This machine was initially acquired to run my PCI Digidesign HD hardware but will now be running only the hardware listed above (I’ll probably track down a second UAD-1 card). Anyhow, the point is the G5 uses a PPC processor and is consequently becoming unsupported by Apple as shown by the advent of Snow Leopard. Logic Studio 2 did, however, install on the G5 quite happily and runs perfectly – the software is a ‘universal binary’ and contains both PPC and Intel code. Obviously Apple isn’t in the business of making PPC-based computers any more so there’s no impetus to support the software on a G5, and certainly not a G4. The way forward from now on with Logic Pro is undeniably with an Intel-based machine, along with OSX 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ – which I’m about to install on my MacBook, having already seen Logic perform well on OSX 10.5.8. Be aware that it’s plausible you’ll not receive a great deal of support from Apple if you’re intent on running Logic Studio 2 on a PPC-based Mac.
To ascertain the extent of Logic Studio 2’s backward ‘installability’ I attempted to install the software on a G4 iBook – it did install, but not before informing me that the video card held less than 64MB of RAM and that it wasn’t compatible with Apple’s OpenCL graphics-card-assisted processing. It works, but it’s unlikely you or the laptop will enjoy the experience.
NEED TO KNOW
Apple have covered most amplification bases with Amp Designer, and there’s pedals aplenty within Pedalboard.
BOX & DICE
Physically speaking, the Logic Studio package has become a shadow of its former self. The box is now nothing more than a CD/DVD style case with the nine install discs and a couple of brief manuals. The first of these covers the initial concepts and use of Mainstage, while the other, entitled ‘Exploring Logic Pro 9’ offers an introduction to Logic Pro’s primary features. The unexpurgated user manuals are available online only, either as online help files or PDF documents. Personally, I prefer to have a book on hand but there are obviously environmental (and marketing) considerations at play here too. The bottom line is that there’s now less paper, less shipping, and more online screen gazing required to bring you up to speed on the operational minutiae.
YOURS FLEXIBLY
Possibly the most publicised new feature in Logic Pro is Flex Time. Flex Time encompasses a number of tools specifically for warping audio files in both pitch and time, and is the evolution of features that have been hinted at since v8. To begin with there’s the ‘Flex Tool’, designed to drag and stretch audio files within a region to fit your required timing. There’s no need to slice or cut regions into tiny pieces before painstakingly moving and time-stretching them to fit. With the Flex Tool you can freely move audio in the time-domain, either elongating or compressing audio without affecting pitch. Set the Flex Audio mode to ‘speed’ and you’ll get much the same result as if you’d place the audio in a sampler and tuned it either up or down. This does work quite well but it’s easy to come unstuck so make sure you’re working with a copy of the original file.
As regions are analysed for their properties before applying any Flex Time adjustments, Logic Pro 9 finds and marks each transient within a region, and these are then editable within the Sample Editor. This allows another feature of Flex Time to become a reality: the quantising of audio. Audio quantisation can be applied over multiple drum tracks as long as the tracks are grouped and of the same region length. Once these criteria are met, the tracks can be phase-locked within the Group Settings window so one track can be referred to as the reference for phase alignment.
Another superb new function is the ability to move notes or hits within an audio file using ‘Slicing’ mode. When clicking on a region with the Flex Tool, the Flex Audio dialogue box asks which style of Flex Audio you wish to use. Selecting Slicing mode analyses and marks transients, and facilitates the free movement of audio between two transient markers forward or backwards, without affecting any transients or the length of the audio being edited. What’s cool is that selecting two or more regions that have been analysed using Slice mode, lets edits made in one region simultaneously affect all the other selected regions. In the case of editing drum takes with multiple tracks, again, set the tracks to a group and make sure the ‘Phase-Locked’ and ‘Editing’ check boxes are ticked. Now editing one region will affect the equivalent regions of other tracks assigned to that group.
Another feature made possible with Flex Time is ‘Speed Fades’. Hidden within the Inspector’s ‘Fade’ section is the option to alter a region-based fade to become a Speed Fade. This provides the questionably useful effect of a turntable slowing down or speeding up. Fine if that’s what you’re into, and I’m sure we’ll hear a spate of this over the next six months, but certainly it does sound like the real thing. Don’t go searching for this feature in any of the manuals, however, as it simply isn’t covered.
I found it pretty easy to shift drums around and correct ‘drummer malfunctions’ without once chopping up a region into painfully tiny sections – the ability to also do this across multiple tracks is just brilliant.
VARISPEED
Perhaps more astonishing and infinitely more useful are Logic Pro 9’s varispeed functions. Varispeed allows you to slow down or speed up an entire multitrack project according to tempo without affecting pitch, or affecting both speed and pitch as though the material was recorded on a multitrack tape recorder with variable speed. Adjusting the deviation from the project’s standard pitch and tempo is readable in percentage, resulting BPM, semitones or Hertz. What is truly stunning about this feature is you can slow down a multitrack project while leaving the pitch at its original tuning, record additional tracks (at the original pitch), then revert the project to its original tempo and pitch, and the newly recorded tracks will miraculously remain in tune with the original recordings. Pretty clever, and super-handy for nailing that part you can’t quite play at speed.
Interestingly, tempo information is now saved within audio files recorded in Logic Pro. This made an appearance in v8, but v9 adds the ability to import and export tempo information from any audio file recorded in Logic Pro, or an audio file having been subjected to Logic Pro’s tempo analysis features. Using Flex Time’s Slicing feature, v9 can ascertain the tempo of a region and will consequently speed up or slow down the region to suit the current project’s tempo – all the while keeping the original pitch intact.
The effectiveness of these pitch and tempo transformations is very much subject to the original audio file quality. If you’re using poorly recorded, noisy or low-resolution files, or audio that is somehow laden with extraneous artefacts, you’re bound to end up confusing Logic Pro’s Flex Time algorithms and winding up with some very weird sounding and unusable audio. As always, verify the results by ear. Having said this, I’m impressed with many of the results I’ve had with the software in the short time I’ve been running it. The new algorithms aren’t up to the standard of the venerable Pitch ‘n Time plug-in from Serato, but they do a very good job, and are far superior to v8’s time-stretching smarts.
Together, these functions are obviously Apple’s answer to Digidesign’s Elastic Audio technology, and go a long way toward bridging that gap in Logic Pro’s bag of tricks. I found it pretty easy to shift drums around and correct ‘drummer malfunctions’ without once chopping up a region into painfully tiny sections – the ability to also do this across multiple tracks is just brilliant.
SOOPER PRODOOCER
Logic Pro 9 incorporates other additional features that Apple likes to call ‘Production Tools’ (one wonders what the rest of Logic Pro is for). First of these is ‘Selective Track Import’, where entire tracks including regions and channel strip settings can be imported from other projects – drag tracks in from a project that was recorded at a different tempo, and the freshly imported audio regions will correct themselves to the current project’s tempo.
The ‘Drum Replacer/Doubling’ feature does exactly as it alludes. Say you have a kick drum you want to replace with a sample, or perhaps you merely wish to add a bit of Wellington boot to a malnourished kick. Selecting a track, then choosing ‘Drum Replacement/Doubling’ from the Arrange Window’s Track menu brings up a tidy little window that will allow you to set the kicks to be replaced using a threshold level control. The pre-listen button then lets you audition kick samples from your EXS24 sampler library. Once you hit ‘Okay’, Logic Pro 9 renders an instrument track alongside the original audio file with an EXS24 utilising the chosen kick sample, all played in time with the original kick recording. There have been methods to do this in previous versions of Logic, but this is by far quicker, and the different samples are much easier to audition.
In a similar twist, regions can be converted to EXS24 sample instruments: select a region, choose ‘Convert Regions to New Sampler Track’, and Logic Pro will set up a sampler instrument with each hit of the region mapped to a note in the EXS24 sampler. This is exactly the same trick Steinberg’s Recycle once achieved so elegantly. Convert Regions to New Sampler Track can also render an entire region to an EXS24 sampler, letting you quickly map entire phrases/regions across the keyboard of an EXS24 sampler.
One new tool in Logic Pro whose debut was long overdue is the option to bounce audio regions in place. The emergence of this tool, dear readership, will be met with cheers and celebration from every quarter. It’s absence has generated more complaints from Logic Pro users in recent times than any other – these users have been forced to watch other DAW applications like Cubase perform this trick for a while now. ‘Bounce Regions In Place’: it’s a riveting concept, and does everything you’d expect from such. You can leave, mute, or delete the source region, bypass effect plug-ins, ignore pan and volume automation, and either include or exclude any effect tails that may be part of the region’s playback. And while this feature may seem insignificant compared with Logic Pro 9’s phantasmagorical feats of time-stretching strength, ‘Bounce Regions In Place’ is likely to produce the largest collective sigh of relief from the Logic Pro party. This alone will save yours truly large portions of my life. Why it didn’t appear in v8, or even v7, is completely beyond me.
LET THERE BE ROCK
Another aspect of Logic Pro 9 that leaves me feeling just a little befuddled, despite how good it is, is why Apple puts so much effort into including guitar oriented plug-ins in Logic Pro 9. ‘Amp Designer’ is the guitar amp simulator that was promised with ‘Guitar Amp Pro’, a plug-in that was essentially useless. Amp Designer on the other hand is the last amp simulator you could possibly need: it actually sounds remarkably good.
Apple has ticked all the right boxes here, with on-board emulations of any name amplifier you’d care to mention: various shades of Fender, two Marshall options, Vox AC30 and 15, Soldano, Mesa Boogie in all its history, and an ‘op-shop special’ that sounds pretty cool when you put a decent cabinet with it. Yes, that’s right, cabinets are interchangeable, as are mic choices and positions. Choose from dynamic, condenser and ribbon, then mix and match amp heads and cabinets until… umm… well, you know – it’s all about tone. The thing that’s odd about Amp Designer is that each amp head has the exact same controls: Gain, three-band EQ, reverb, sync’able tremolo or vibrato, and master output. Obviously a Fender amplifier doesn’t have the same controls as a Vox AC15, but I can only assume this made the coding process simpler.
While we’re on the subject of plug-ins, I’ll point out a new Logic Pro preference allowing plug-ins to be viewed at various magnifications. As you’re no doubt aware, plug-ins can be quite small when presented on a large monitor, and these days Logic Pro is best viewed on a 16:9 widescreen monitor. To compensate for this, v9 allows Logic plug-ins to be views at larger sizes, starting at 100 percent and going through to 200 percent. Nice one.
MORE ON THE FLOOR
No self-respecting guitarist would feel secure without at least a couple of effect pedals between their amp and guitar – save Angus Young who simply plugs his SG straight into a Marshall. The pedal-board plug-in offers most pedals you’d ever require, and most are modelled, both sonically and graphically, on well-known and well-used pedals. There are 30 plug-ins in total to keep things varied – and that includes very useful ‘Splitter’ and ‘Mixer’ plug-ins. The Pedal-board plug-in even has its own control surface available through Apogee Electronics: GiO is a bespoke audio interface and foot controller for Logic Pro 9, which we’ll have a more in-depth look at next issue. At this juncture all I’ll say is that they sound alarmingly good – so much so that I wouldn’t be rushing out to upgrade your current amp and pedal simulation plug-ins without giving these a once over.
LOGIC PREVAILS
So after a look through the new features in Logic Pro 9, I should point out some of the under-the-bonnet benefits and pitfalls of upgrading. Firstly, Logic Pro now appears to utilise multiple processors correctly. Sure my tawdry dual-core machines don’t immediately reflect this, but cohorts with multi-core Intel machines are reporting more even distribution of processing across cores. Secondly, the application seems incredibly stable. It boots very quickly and quits cleanly. I’m also especially fond of the finer increments on faders in the mixer – no longer confined to 128 steps. Disheartening aspects include the disappearance of the ‘Samples Clipped’ message that would appear if you clipped a recording – last sighted in v7, and distributed audio processing is still a total crap-shoot. There’s also been a price rise of $100, which isn’t so surprising – v8 was pretty cheap at $649.
So am I impressed? Indeed I am. Every primary iteration of Logic is well worth the wait, and for me this version is possibly ‘the one’, or at least the one I settle on for the foreseeable future – I’d wager the computer I’m using won’t run the next iteration anyway.
RESPONSES