Logic... I'm Breaking Up With You.
DAW's. Everyone has their favorite. For me, it was Logic. Yeah, I said was. Because I'm officially breaking up with my DAW and am looking to date a new digital audio workstation that will treat me right.
Love At First Sight
Let me start back in the days of Logic 8. As I was assisting sound designer Obadiah Eves for Shinning City at the Huntington Theatre in Boston, I noticed he was using Logic during tech. At that time, I had just recently purchased my first Mac (an iMac 2007 21") and I was looking for a DAW since at the time Adobe Audition wasn't on OSX.
He raved about how great it was, and how Apple turned the product around after they bought out the company with Logic 7. A redesigned interface, less buggy, the works. So he showed me around the interface of Logic 8, and I fell in love. I almost immediately purchased Logic 8 for a whopping $500 and couldn't be happier.
When Logic 9 came out, it was like renewing my vows. Logic introduced "Flex Time", a tool that let you dynamically stretch the time of a waveform. It could even quantize audio!
Trouble in Paradice
Logic X. I almost don't need to say anything else. But I will.
Most people talk about the interface being too much like Garage Band. Yet I didn't mind the interface changes so much. Yeah, the shortcuts changed a bit, but that's an easy thing to either change in the preferences or to just learn the new ones. The only thing I might take issue with is the Library view taking about a third of the window. My beef is mostly with the functionality and bugs.
Let's start by talking about virtual instruments. Not only when you create a new instrument track does it automatically add a piano instrument to it, but it adds not one, but two buses. Then when you changed the instrument from one of the Logic supplied instruments it didn't remove the old bus sends, it added new ones. The first time I used one I had to delete 24 buses because I wasn't looking at the mixer while sampling the different instruments. This was a bug that they didn't fix for about a year and a half (honestly I lost track because I stopped using their instruments).
Next, there's the 'buggyness'. This is what really takes the cake for me. Jumping between midi regions doesn't retain the view based on the locator head, connectivity issues with midi controllers, inconsistent buffer size resulting in dropped samples for even small projects, and the lack of a bridging mechanism for 32-bit Audio Unit plugin (the plugin format created by Apple while intentionally not having VST support so they could promote AU creation).
And my favorite, trying to put the additional content on an external drive. Not only was it a complete pain in the ass, but you would get popups that are annoying to get rid of to download new content. Yet the new content wouldn't go on your external drive.
Moving On
After a recent midi recording session with just a single instrument, I am done. Apple you completely destroyed an amazing product that I love and defended for years.
We are over. Don't call me again. I am going to find a sexier DAW that will treat me right and accept me for me.