Product Reviews

The release of Logic Pro 7 sees something of a sea change for the product. Since Apple acquired Emagic in 2003, there have been few major new features added or revisions made. By contrast, this upgrade has Apple written all over it. Logic Pro 7 continues the altruistic approach to its plug-in bundle, with several important and truly excellent new products, but there has also been the first major overhaul of Logic's interface for some years.

For a start, the background is a lot greyer. Also, the text denoting the various parameters has become much smaller. Logic's old 'telescope' zoom buttons have been replaced by Final Cut Pro-style sliders and the most common editing functions are now accessed via drop-down menus. Buttons have become more rounded and Aqua-like, and elements such as track meters have more pronounced shading and gradations to better show levels. Having lived with the new interface for a while, we prefer it.

One very welcome addition to the retail box is the quality (and quantity) of the all-new printed documentation, notably the 700+ page Reference Manual and its 600-page companion piece, the Plug-in Reference.

It would also appear that Apple has heeded the constant cry from people new to Logic of, 'I tried to use it, but I didn't understand the Environment', cleverly adding new functions that serve to effectively hide it away if necessary. The Logic Setup Assistant will help cable up a suitable autoload song and the File/New/Use Song Template option contains Templates for common recording situations, such as audio recording, music for video, mastering or surround mixing. Another nifty trick is the ability to add new tracks on the fly, with Logic automatically taking care of all the cabling.

The ability to save entire Channel Strips, including all FX routing and settings, is brilliant and will save a lot of musicians a lot of time. Logic also now supports GarageBand Instruments, as well as finally fully supporting Apple Loops.

All very welcome refinements, but it is the new features that are justifiably grabbing the headlines. The three new plug-in heavyweights are Guitar

ADVERTISEMENT

Amp Pro, Sculpture and Ultrabeat. Guitar Amp Pro is an amp modelling plug-in, featuring 11 different amps, 15 speaker cabinets, condenser and dynamic microphone modes with virtual mic placement and integrated effects. It should have a few hardware manufacturers worried - for ease of use, it's hard to top it.

Sculpture is what Apple calls a component modelling synth, whereby you define the material of the source (nylon, steel, wood or glass) and then use exciters to define whether it should be bowed, plucked, or picked. It's incredibly complex at first, but capable of delivering anything from beautiful, lush, evolving tones and drones, to pads, basses, percussion, plucked instruments, bell and glass tones, FX and more.

Ultrabeat is Logic's first drum module - suitably imposing and bristling with dials - and is a collection of separate synth and sample playback engines, rather than just a simple drum machine. There is an integrated 32-stage step sequencer and dozens of drumkits supplied, plus further samples can be imported. It sounds great.

There's also a new addition to Logic's E-series synths, the EFM1, which tackles frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. New FX include Ringshifter, Vocal Transformer, Pitch Correction, Phase EQ and Match EQ. As always, there is a plethora of ear-opening presets to explore.

Logic Pro 7 also introduces the idea of Distributed Audio Processing, whereby any additional G4 or G5 Mac connected via a gigabit Ethernet connection can help process CPU-intensive tracks. There is also much better support for third-party MIDI controllers. Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that Waveburner Pro has finally made its long-overdue appearance in OS X, bundled here with Pro 7, although the news has been tempered by its lacklustre performance so far.

With such a major upgrade, a few glitches are inevitable. We'll have to wait for the release of OS X 10.4 (Tiger) for the support of multiple hardware devices, and the Logic Tutorial song is missing from the install DVD. Invoking Expose causes plug-in windows to disappear (unless you opened them using option+command) and the only backwards compatibility option is to 4.8 format. Finally, the new Logic AU Manager has proved contentious, although this is largely down to the fact that many plug-ins were not updated in time by their manufacturers.

Regardless of such issues, Logic Pro 7 plus a (relatively) modern Mac equals one stable, powerful, CPU-friendly native music system. On a 1GHz dual-processor G4 Power Mac running OS X 10.3.5, projects both old and new ran calmly and efficiently. Considering the wealth of new features, Logic Pro 7 is now arguably the strongest, most complete music sequencer on the market.