Logic Pro X coming soon?

A Japanese site reports that a new Logic is under development.

If you have been following what happened (and is still happening) with Final Cut Pro X you will know that is frightening stuff.

Which is not to say that we don't enjoy FCP X tremendously. Having only used iMovie three times in my life I have to say that playing around with this latest Final Cut was easy and a lot of fun. But we don't actually work with video, so it's no surprise that all the missing features are not a problem.

And in time it will no doubt realise its amazing potential. But let's see what we know and don't know of the next version of Logic...


Well, actually we don't know a great deal. This page is written in Japanese and some kind of translated English, and I suspect that it reads better in Japanese. I am waiting for confirmation from my friends that can read it.
What it says is that it will NOT have a Garage Band interface. This is welcome news. Not that I thought they would, but nice to hear anyway.

The only other information is that appraently they will be dropping Soundtrack Pro (and that's just fine, it was a terrible application and no one used it) and they will be incorporating the functionality of Wave Burner directly inside Logic. This makes sense and should be fine, except maybe that if you have ever used Wave Burner you should have noticed its main functionality was to crash a lot. But anyway, OK, we can compile and master a CD directly in Logic.

Lastly, they would be selling MainStage as a separate app. This also makes sense. In the grand scheme of things we can expect that Logic will retail via the AppStore for even less that it already was, and so if you want MainStage you should buy it separately. I bet the sum of two is still cheaper than the current Logic Studio package.

But which other revolutionary game-changing features are we going to have (or not have)? Well, the one I'd expect the most is on-clip non-destructive processing: in other words, if you want to apply an effect to just one word of your song you should be able to open a plugin just on that section of audio instead of affecting the whole channel. Soundtrack Pro had it, Wave Burner had it, and I was very surprised to see that it didn't make it in to Logic 9.

But this takes me to my greatest fear. What if, in a wave of new radical thinking, they decide to do without tracks? This is the way the new Final Cut Pro X works: you never see tracks, you simply drop audio in a arrangement area and assign effects to it, including automation directly on the region. The tracks are sort of created and deleted in the background by the software so you can hear as many objects as you like, but you are never aware of how this is possible. You never see horizontal lines, you don't see a mixer as such. And while this is a very intuitive way of working for someone that simply needs to drop bits of audio on to a film (and you can group them, hide them, change volumes and add effects directly on the regions) it would be a very bad thing for us.

Imagine wanting to add some reverb to a vocal. Hundred of regions after careful vocal comping, punching, editing, overdubbing. It is very convenient that anything that is on that track will take the effect. If instead I had to go and select all the regions and somehow put them in a group to add the effect, well, it would be a massive waste of time.

Maybe I worry too much, but I can see how someone that doesn't actually work with audio might be tempted to innovate and get rid of the tape recorder / mixing desk paradigm: make the most of new technology and drop the old way of doing things.
Certainly there are a lot of interesting things we could try in developing new software and new working methods. But the thing with Apple is that when (rarely) they get it wrong, they get it wrong a lot and all of a sudden. So I will keep my fingers crossed for now and pray.

Now it's your turn to think of the most crazy ideas of what could go in or out the new Logic, but if I were you I wouldn't wait to buy the software in case the new one comes out. I would rush to buy the software precisely because the new one cold come out.