Apple brings Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro to iPad

1. Touch first is important because your instruments are touch as well. Being able to record my live instruments and not have to switch to a trackpad to move between UI elements seems small, but it really keeps me in the zone.

2. Same point above, but basically being able to switch between my live instrument and an on screen virtual one is a big deal to layer up an idea. Can’t do that easily with a trackpad or mouse.

3. There’s something to be said for the mobile platforms single app as a focus model. I know you can full screen a Mac app, or split screen on an iPad, but having a singular focus helps reduce distractions.

4. Weight/portability are quite different. Maybe a MacBook Air would be better, but I take my iPad Pro to more places with me than I take my much heavier MacBook Pro . I’m already taking it to draw on the go, so this is just one more thing I can do without needing to buy a new device or take a heavier one.

Edit: oh and number 5 is a big one. I can put my iPad Pro in my existing music stand that works for me at multiple heigh levels. There are laptop stands that might work too, but I already use my iPad for sheet music, so it’s already a convenient setup.

The problem is that all Windows or Linux music apps tend to presume a large monitor and a mouse and keyboard. I've not found anything terribly usable.

Just curious if anyone knows. Suppose a band of the future is just a few players who show up with iPads (guitar, bass, key/synth, drums) and, where relevant, a control surface (midi controller, edrums, etc). Does Logic have a "federated" mode? Can each iPad synchronize to a shared click track or other backing tracks for lights, etc or does the "brain" of a performance still need to be centralized?

Edit: I'm wondering if that "federated" functionality could be used to reduce the amount of gear required for a band using IEMs. That would be a _killer_ use case.

I'm super excited about this though and really looking forward to a major step forward at least in the guitar world.

When I look for books on Core Audio there’s approximately one on Amazon and it isn’t very recent.

I don’t really want to live on another layer, like developing in Max or Juce or AudioKit or whatever is out there.

I’d rather code directly against Apple’s APIs. Or I think that’s what I want. Maybe I’m misguided.

Do you have any suggestions?

I had always assumed pro-level DAW users would want lots of knobs and sliders to change as many parameters of the sound as easily and quickly as possible.

I’m a hobbyist music maker and I vastly prefer AUM on my iPad to working in GarageBand (logic is far beyond my needs). I just want more of the desktop plugin ecosystem to trickle down.

However I’m a Logic Pro user. Cubase is great but it just never clicked with me as much as Logic did. I’ve gone through a majority of the DAWs on macOS but Logic Pro and Live were the only ones that really stuck for me.

Obviously purely subjective. I edited my comment above to reflect my DAW preference factors in.

Sure you can make EDM with more limited means, but a DAW opens up basically everything.

[1] having a good soprano sax that basically plays itself feels like cheating, but one of the reasons for that is having developed the skills to keep crappy sopranos cooperating reasonably well for so long too.

It should do about the same as the "oxygen-free copper" cables, perhaps slower - moving bits from A to B.

Is there any evidence otherwise?

I use iPad with RME ADI DAC-2 and I can't think of a single issue.

I don't know about Final Cut, but I do know lots of Logic users in the media composing world. Some will keep using it no matter what but plenty will leave for Cubase or Studio One if Apple forces a subscription on them. And Logic is probably the reason they buy Macs for producing music...

It would be a terrible move by Apple.

That said, a dual pricing model can get unstuck depending on the future development path of the app. Does the perpetual license include the next major version? What is the price of a major version upgrade? How does that compare to the value of the subscription price?

You mean like with a credit card?

Maybe that's a factor, and in this particular case a reasonably large one, but I'd guess it's because subscription revenue is the holy grail for modern software. People end up spending way, way more than they would have, often forgetting about the subscription and paying for it when they don't even use it, and the revenue is predictable and stable. There aren't any downsides for the company, and the question of ethics is irrelevant to them

Or people don't want to have to continuously pay to have access to some latest version, and prefer to update when they feel like it and need some new feature, not always.

Producers and video editors especially hate to have to upgrade.

As for subscriptions, they have made the total yearly cost for getting a product much higher in many cases (doubled it in the case of some software), and made you lose your software any time you have to prioritize something else over its payment, like a medical emergency...

They also have perpetual sales cycles that only serve to trick new customers into thinking the sale price is actually a deal and not just the normal price (this is not exclusive to Waves but they do it more broadly and more often than anyone else except for Plugin Alliance).

In other words, Waves is the used car salesman of the audio plugin world. Certainly not alone in that, but way less trustworthy than a big player like Apple. Who knows what they'd try to pull this time. THAT is the sentiment behind the recent uproar.

Paying hundreds of pounds and having nothing to show for it is fucking lame.

defensive much? I didn't see anything even remotely resembling shit in GP's comment. You'd probably have a better time on the internet (HN at least) if you don't go around looking for things to be offended by whether they're intended or not.

What about the people that will emerge as YouTubers because they can now run a channel without buying a computer?

There's a non zero amount of people that have ditched the PC as their main computing device for this reason

I volunteered to edit a demo video for our internal hackathon project, and had both an M1 iPad and a new macbook. I wanted to go all out on the video just for the fun of it, and I still had some of the final cut pro muscle memory from many years before, even though it was a much older version. iMovie proved to be extremely inadequate even for some basics (on both macbook and ipad). iPad had some third party options, but they were all either unwieldy or expensive or various other issues. For macbook, there were various alternatives (davinci, etc), but they either had similarly high pricing or various other limitations or an insane learning curve (which i don't mind usually, but not in those circumstances). Final Cut was only available as a full-priced option. I would have easily been willing to pay $10-20 for one month worth of access for this project, but no way I am paying hundreds for that. Ended up using iMovie and making the video that i absolutely hated and that wasn't resembling anything I had in mind for it at all.

P.S. I am genuinely baffled by how terrible iMovie is compared to its big sibling Final Cut Pro, given how amazing and well-rounded GarageBand is compared to its big sibling Logic Pro. GarageBand is obviously not competing with Logic Pro, I was just trying to illustrate that Apple has those hobby->pro creative app relationships (iMovie->Final Cut Pro, GarageBand->Logic Pro), and the GB->LP one is imo fantastic overall, and both products are shining in their respective tiers, and I get a good use out of both of them. But with iMovie->Final Cut Pro, I am pretty much fighting against iMovie even for some basic things and would rather deal with Final Cut only. And yes, for basic video editing, I still miss windows movie maker (the newer MSFT replacement for it, Clipchamp, is the worst out of major basic video editing software i've ever used).

For Adobe, at least, the actual monthly rate is way higher.

Yeah, that model is infuriating. While your subscription is running you get the updates. Then they snatch them away if you cancel. It's a dark pattern.

False unless they changed it recently. It explicitly read last version on the subscription. I actually bought one a few years back and I got fallback to the last version of the subscription timeframe.

Regarding the “why”, it’s simply the option that properly aligns interests. A long enough subscription (ie an year), should cover initial expenses and development during the period, if the company wants to keep a customer paying, it needs to keep making the software better.

It’s putting customer first, which is something companies tend to forget which tend to lead to a downfall if they have not secured a strong prison/moat for their rent seeking behaviors.

Companies with proper alignment on incentives tend to make/maintain/develop better products over a larger timeframe. But ofc that was meaningless when money was “cheap” (negative interest rates), so VCs could just dump a huge amount of money on creating some competitor out of nowhere, put it out for free, operate under losses, and once they have “captured” a big enough userbase and fcked the rest of the competition, and have decent lock in, start the shitification of service for revenue, to make up for all the “investment”, leaving customers with no proper alternative.

A perpetual fallback license is showing customer that you care. And it’s also putting a gun on yourself to keep improving the product instead of stagnating for “captured” revenue. Also, happy customers tend to give free publicity, look here at hackernews how their tools are mostly praised.

Edit: it seems that indeed they changed the version to the initial plus bugfixes, or 12months old if using consecutive monthly billing

They were compensated when you bought the version you keep. If you get nothing from them after that, then what would they be compensated for? I could understand it if the application required server-side resources, but if it's all local, then no further compensation is due.

If you buy Microsoft Word and make $10 million from a novel, you don't have to kick any of that back to Microsoft. The software company has no claim to the value created by their software beyond the licensing costs.

Nordstrom's liberal return policy increased sales. Probably by mooting the fear of buyer's remorse. Their policy definitely wasn't motivated by altruism.

Maybe something similar is happening with Jetbrains.

I continue to pay yearly for Ultimate, even though I only use vanilla IntelliJ, and sometimes not for years. Why? I have no idea.

I usually cancel subscriptions without hestitaion. Somehow the Jetbrains license doesn't piss me off and I'm content knowing I could cancel without too much inconvenience, should I choose.

Whatever the case, I'm certain they validated their current license maximizes revenue.

If you have a device that doesn’t support the newest version of the app, you can choose to “download the last compatible version”

iOS and iPadOS are not stable systems like OSX where the fundamentals of the overall experience is clear and largely complete. There is still a lot of innovation and new concepts being introduced each year.

To have a large percentage of users with older apps that won't properly support these changes would hurt the platform.

As was mentioned feature flags are a much better option.

not yet, and most likely just not in the us

but due to the european union digital markets act, apple will have to allow for side loading, and somebody was speculating it will only be in the EU.

As for 'side loading', it's somewhat possible, but even if it was available by default it would be messy for most customers -- they already have trouble with what's currently available. Perhaps some sort of in-app store would make that model feasible. The vendor gets to show and deploy whatever they want, and the end-user gets a very clear and very specific list of options for the app/vendor. That would even be better than the 'everyone in one store' model for some more specialised apps, especially when searching (which currently leads to a plethora of tangential ads and applications you actually don't want).

It works - for me - with any combination of Macs; old or new, desktop or laptop, on any given network configuration; in any location - about 3 or 4 out of ten times I give it a shot.

It’s honestly baffling to me how Apple has for more than a decade shipped a major feature that works easily less than half the time in my experience and my co-workers. Coworkers and I mostly completely avoid it at this point; and if we do actually give it a try, it feels more like praying to a God for rain than actually trying to use a piece of software.

I really have to wonder what has made it just so, brutally; unusably broken, for more than a decade.

I just guess nobody at Apple cares?

Great for getting one's feet wet, or for ideas that spring to mind when you hear something cool on the street or on the train or whatever. Hear something, record it, manipulate it, and make a quick beat or riff on the spot.

However, like you, that's just a small part of the process, and if one wants to do something more with the sound they recorded, it needs to be moved to a more powerful platform - in this case a laptop. A DAW on the iPad is neat, but kind of stuck between usecases.

In some ways, the lack of updates can be a feature. I'm sure we've all been frustrated by updates that break our workflows, deprecate useful functionality, or inadvertently degrade performance.

Or when an older device is cut off from the app store?

At home, I run a 13 year old Mac Mini in my studio. Everything DAW related on it still works, and it's all compatible with each other. This is quite common in many studios I've worked in. It's not unusual to be running 10-15+ year old machines. Everything is updated as far as it's ever going to go on that hardware.

I do like the Jetbrains model where there is a perpetual fallback license. It think that would be a good balance for software like DAWs.

This is Apple we are talking about, this is greed-based.

As a user, fuck subscriptions. Subscriptions just cause me to move all my tooling to open source variants over time. Developer livelihood is not my concern.

Maybe OSS with a Pateron-style model is the way forward?

Also, practically, consumers in the audio software market are more savvy and have higher expectations than those in other markets. In particular, they expect a fair ownership model (something provided by many plugin and DAW shops, big or small), and are wary of subscriptions and things like them. Perpetual licenses are the norm - in fact, even things uncommon in other software markets like the ability to resell your licenses are often provided due to market pressure.

Bottom line is that the App Store not having upgrade pricing has forced everything to become a subscription.

If a subscription fee is what it takes to get some attention then so be it; $5/mo is certainly reasonable. But I wouldn't assert it as a foregone conclusion.

It's a fine model if both models are available. You might spend some $ for some months to try it out, then you decide to buy it. But what they really want is for you to never ever stop paying, because you have a bunch of files and works you did that you "just might" have to open soon so you might as well keep the sub running...

They had other near-subscription software in the past (OS X Server), but I don’t recall any distributed software subscriptions from them.

I used to work on a competing product, and subscription pricing will work better for most people who are in this market, so my personal use case is an outlier I know.

Edit: all that said, I’m excited to be the first person to subscribe to Logic on the iPad. I hope that subscription is Family Sharing enabled as well!

I know Adobe has “proven” pros will take subscription software and like it, but for every day users who like to mess around now and then, I have no interest in a perpetual subscription.

However, I expect them all to follow suit and use a subscription model. But this may be preferable than shelling out a couple hundred up front for each one. Vendors that have lots of virtual instruments will likely have attractive bundle subscription prices.

I just haven’t seen much new lately. Of course, nobody needs 10 more compressor plugins, but I also haven’t really seen any innovation in Logic either.

I’d like to see more competition. And I think it’s tricky at this price.

Luckily, piracy remains an option if you're willing to download patches manually.

I really wish iOS opens up to accept a real terminal.

I know iSH exists but it runs using usermode x86 emulation.

Logic on iOS? Could be an entirely different story as it relies on other apps as plugins that may change. Just to err on the side of caution, assume that if it isn't saved as audio or MIDI, you'll probably be screwed.

Paying a recurring monthly subscription isn't the only way to get a trial.

I understand what you are saying, and it sucks indeed, but there are other systems that have exactly the same 'problem' and in real life this is a problem for the minority of people. apple sells to the masses, and they will do what the majority of the people want/need/use. Sure, it sux if you dont fit in that group, but that has been the thing with most big vendors of things.

People work where they want to and jow they want to. If the tool works for you, go for it.