Logic Pro X
apple.com
apple.com
Unfortunately it seems Apple has gone in the direction of Garageband-ifiyng Logic; pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds. The interface is dominated by the flashy new features such as the 'Drummer' and 'Drum Kit Designer' which effectively let you combine a limited set of preset drum sounds with a limited set of preset drumming styles. The result is a similar 'toy' feel to that of Garageband.
Professional tools for creativity afford the user the ability to manipulate, combine and repurpose them in as much depth and complexity as user can manage, so that they may seek out new forms, rather than just creating pastiche rehashes of existing ideas. It is apparent from the direction Logic has taken that it is no longer aimed at the professional market, but rather more to the 'Prosumer' category, who aspire to be 'Pro', but who still need a lot of hand-holding.
The most displeasing change I've noticed so far is that the 'bypass' button on each instrument and effect, which neatly fitted in with Logic's formerly clean and understated visual style, has now been replaced with a large glowing on/off 'light'. It is succinctly represents all of the changes across the application which discard neat and elegant design for absolute naive ease of use.
I have a feeling I'll be using Ableton more from now on.
So yes you can do the same with ableton.
I'm still a fan of Logic Pro and will most likely buy the upgrade. My workflow gravitates towards Ableton for grid-based compositions (I do a lot of electronic music) and Logic for anything where I'm recording "real" instruments like guitar and vocals, because of Logic's great comping workflow.
Where Ableton really excels (other than for live performance) is in productivity of compositing and production when working entirely within the application. It could be compared to using digital painting applications to create a work of visual art entirely in software.
Logic has long had a home in the 'pro' world at the songwriting and demo production stage. You'll be hard-pressed to find an engineer in a commercial studio doing tracking or mixing in anything other than Pro Tools (though they certainly exist), but Logic has a healthy following with artists themselves. When viewed through that lens, the changes made in this version are a pretty natural progression for the software: for the most part, they're aimed at the writing and tracking process.
With that in mind, the 'Drummer' feature is less 'Garageband-y' than it might look: it's a considerably more flexible alternative to the giant pool of pre-recorded beats (Apple Loops) that Logic has had for a long time. Such a tool is pretty useful to the songwriter putting a demo together, to the music-for-picture composer, to the ever-growing army of artists who ship off near-completed songs to musician-for-hire studios on the web. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's heard those loops in commercial recordings (often in TV music, which is composed under deadlines to tighter budgets). I'm looking forward to being able to have my temporary backing rhythm follow the sections of a song: far better than trying to find a matching loop or building a beat from scratch when all you want is to lay down a guitar part and focus on developing your idea.
Your argument about the bypass button is just silly. If you have a bunch of plugins open on screen at once, it's obviously better to be able to see, at a glance, which ones are on or off. The old way made that harder. Clearly you have never sat for half an hour tweaking a compressor, certain of the improvement it was making, only to realize the damn thing was in bypass the entire time.
I can see more Pro-oriented things in there than you: a redesigned channel strip that reorients itself according to signal flow. Meters that work. A scriptable MIDI processor. Flex pitch, or whatever they called it. I also see a crisper UI and a clever way to facilitate interaction with complex instruments and plugins (the Smart Control macro thingies).
Of course, I'm just an amateur, so I suppose my opinion doesn't count. I suspect that you are too, but perhaps I'm just more comfortable with it.
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EDIT: I guess my long-winded point is this: why does it matter whether you think the program is becoming 'easier to use' (the horror); all that should matter is whether the new features are meaningful to you, and whether it breaks anything you need at present.
I work in enterprise software by day, and our UX team is constantly looking to consumer software and devices for usability ideas. There is absolutely nothing inherently bad about making something difficult become easy to use. It cuts down on errors, makes people happier, decreases stress, and makes them more productive. All of these things are just as valuable in the studio as they are in the accounts receivable office. There is nothing 'pro' about making life difficult for yourself.
The thing I'm most looking forward to? The iPad app. TouchOSC is great, but this looks like I'll be able to load new instruments and create new tracks! Perfect: I can sit on my big comfy chair far from my screen, guitar in my hands, ipad on the arm, and muck about like I used to with a Portastudio. I might even break my iron-clad "No Apple dot-zero version" rule.
(On a side note, the dig against free jazz seems unnecessary. It rarely makes sense to dismiss an entire genre of music as meaningless. Occam's Razor is a heuristic, not a law, but consider which of these hypotheses seems like the more reasonable choice to explain the datum "I don't hear anything meaningful in free jazz":
1. I am not concerned with or attuned to the musical priorities and structures that inform free jazz.
2. Everyone who derives meaning from free jazz, a group that includes some very skilled musicians, is wrong about it being meaningful.
The choice seems evident.)
You seem to be taking the term 'amateur' as dismissive or even insulting. I absolutely do not mean any offence by it, simply that it represents a shifting of focus of the application to a different group of users with a different set of needs. However, I see this group as already being served by something such as Garageband (perhaps with just a few additions of functionality).
I lament a truly great tool for high end users becoming watered down and less efficient for its established base, who know what they're doing and just need the interface to get out of the way as much as possible.
Regardless, I was attempting to express my genuine sadness and disappointment in one of my favourite tools becoming a bit less useful to users such as myself, I certainly didn't intend it to come across as an 'ego massage'.
Arguing about this stuff is all fun, but ultimately we're all musicians (among other things). Snarkiness doesn't help anyone, so I apologize if I caused any offense to you personally. I do stand by what I said about your comment though.
all that should matter is whether the new features are meaningful to you, and whether it breaks anything you need at present.
It's all too rare that a person's conclusion directly contradicts their own thesis.
Checking if the new features matter to you, and your workflow is not "ego massage".
It's simply being honest about your needs and pragmatic.
The "ego massage" which the parent complaints about is a different thing, namely the: "I'm so pro, but Apple made it easier for amateurs, not 1337 like me, this sucks" kind of drivel.
Notice there was nothing about how it hampers HIS workflow, only high level, zero-content, judgements about it being easier for amateurs, the Drummer feature being toy like, the Garageband-pro meme, etc.
Not to mention that from the whole comment, one can easily deduce he hasn't even tried the software in person.
Your interpretation is yours, and your choice to make a linkage between two usages of the word 'meaning' that weren't intended is also valid. I can't very well attack the original comment based on my reading of it and then ask you not to do the same to mine. That being said, my comment was structured like this:
1. Attention grabber: you're full of hot air. 2. This is why. 3. Here's a more mature way to think about pros, amateurs, and software.
I don't believe that the passing reference to a style of music has any real effect on the thrust of my argument.
I am slightly regretting picking on free jazz: its fans are, predictably, articulate. Perhaps I should have used Markov chain poetry instead of free jazz, then only the algorithms would be upset.
In the US, maybe. In Europe Cubase and Logic are very prominent in studios.
And even in the US studios, Logic is used a lot alonside Pro Tools, for it's MIDI editing.
Ableton Live is even more centered around building music around loops and samples. Obviously you can track and mix recorded instruments in it just as well, but the live composition view (as opposed to the more traditional, linear arrangement view) that gives Ableton 50% of its name cannot be understated.
They never slowed. Logic had like 9 point updates, some with impressive new features (64-bit, OSC, etc).
>Unfortunately it seems Apple has gone in the direction of Garageband-ifiyng Logic; pushing it towards amateurs who want to easily piece together their musical ideas from other people's sounds. The interface is dominated by the flashy new features such as the 'Drummer' and 'Drum Kit Designer' which effectively let you combine a limited set of preset drum sounds with a limited set of preset drumming styles. The result is a similar 'toy' feel to that of Garageband.
No, it's not at all. Actually you never even get to see the "Drummer" and the "Drum Kit Designer" unless you need them. The Drummer is basically nothing more than a kick ass intelligent drum plugin, like Strike (by Digidesign), Studio Drummer (NI), etc.
Logic has all the power of Logic 9 AND tons of new stuff besides. In fact, for recording, playing and adjusting your own ideas, it has more power than ever, with new instruments, new editing functions (the melodyne like thing for one), MIDI mangling, Bass amps, etc.
The "using other people sounds" is such a small part of Logic that what you write doesn't even make sense. A meager few GB library of loops, that were there always.
In fact, if anything, it's the opposite: Live was from the start touted as an easy to use app to mange loops and beats, sampled or bought. It's very core is about mangling loops and keeping them in sync. And it's mostly geared towards electronic music, where "using other people's sounds" is a very big thing. Of course it has since added MIDI and other stuff, but Logic was an is an all around DAW -- and it's the one you see in most professional studios with the exception of Pro Tools (or, sometimes, alongside PT).
I work on music with someone 300 miles away and I'd love to have the power of git. Right now were both using different DAWs and export audio to dropbox. This release of Logic looks great and my partner is already using Logic so if I switch over and implemented git we could ideally be working off the same files all the time with version tracking, backups and branches.
I could see it potentially being very large though and merging audio files probably wouldn't be possible so maybe this is something that still needs to be built?
Here's the repo if you are interested: https://github.com/jpsullivan/LogicProjects
One day I'd really like to make an open source album that people could fork to remix entirely new sounds. It'd also be nice to get some people talking about best practices when mixing. Perhaps a Logic Bootstrap if you will.
Oh, the irony...
Only artists don't usually like it when somebody else "improves" their music -- that's a recipy for havoc. They have what is called a "vision" for their piece, so that any improvement would have to play within that vision.
Not to mention that what's an "improvement" to one, is an abomination for another.
http://log.scifihifi.com/post/344372246/it-may-have-been-a-f...
>[Y]ou’ll probably recognize the "Dream Team" of expert bakers convened by Gundrum as his "open source" group falling into the same sorts of traps (a lack of coherent vision, a reluctance to discount any idea, an obsession with novel and exotic techniques, a mounting frustration as individual contributors struggle to be heard). In the end, they turn in a passable but uninspiring product, while the traditional R&D team wins the competition by acting on a bit of clever insight from its leader.
1. http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-baza...
How would it "shrink" them? You record uncompressed audio in high resolution and bitrate. At the very best it could half them if it could use some loseless algorithm, but DAWs record and use AIFF and WAV.
The size of MIDI/automation files, for example, are insignificant.
As for samples, those are usually referenced from outside the project.
You just have to make sure to include all your samples in your project, in ableton you do that with the "Collect and save all" option, Logic has one but I don't remember how it is called.
would love to hear from people that are interested in this - you can reach out directly to me paosinaga@yahoo.com
1) How many professionals use Logic 2) How common it is for said professionals to pass tracks back and forth over email, im, Dropbox and other filesharing services
Maybe advertising such as service gives artists an unwarranted assumption of privacy and security vs. using something like email where there is less expectation and more assumed risk.
So for a lot of people the experience would be subpar (with their 2-20MBps assymetric DSL etc). Not, Apple could only enabled for speedy connections (symmetric, fiber etc), but then tons of users would cry for being excluded.
That's not how Apple usually rolls.
I'd say than when the speeds are mature enough, in 4-5 years, there would be a version of Logic with iCloud support.
For now, they can leave it to third party providers, like Dropbox, so they get all the blame (and/or praise, for those that are content with that).
On the other hand, the github idea is interesting. You "open-source" your music and allow others to fork it while still having some form of version control and rolling back if you don't like the changes or just want to revert to a different stage in the mix.
documentData is your project file. It includes the "code" needed to make your project go. This can be diffed, merged and branched with almost no effort. You will see the effects in Logic. You have to save & close Logic before doing the Git stuff, then reopen it to see your changes.
Everything else is pretty much binary WAV files. Logic is nice about creating new WAVs for every change you make, so while all the files do take up a bit of space it makes diffing a bit easier (manually, you can't `git diff` audio files).
BTW some friends and I are working on an service that does this, using Git and everything, and allowing you to use any DAW you wish: http://notepunch.com
A bounced audio track won't allow a lot of deeper editing. Midi only doesn't tell the recipient anything about the instrument you used in your original version.
Of course I'm describing the issues from a perspective of someone who tends to rather work with synthesized material than recorded audio, which doesn't apply to every artist, yet it remains a very difficult problem, a dropbox folder or simple file exchange won't make it work in my opinion.
The pitch correction stuff is cool - I dreamed of that sort of stuff a while ago, but never made any attempt to try to work out how it'd work. I wonder how it works with voices and the like, as opposed to string instruments.
Sequencers (Logic Pro, Cubase, etc) were originally built to work along side classic studio hardware. And while more and more studios these days go all software, the sequencer paradigm has stuck because it largely works. You're also right that many soft-synths / virtual instruments are there to emulate real hardware, but there's also plugins like tone generators which are quite a departure from the classic studio paradigm.
Aside sequencers, you can get other types of DAWs like trackers which, trigger digital audio projects like one would with a sequencer; except trackers have a completely digital approach (watching a tracker play is more akin to watching a hex dump scroll down a terminal emulator than watching waveforms scroll horizontally across a sequencer). Then there's DAWs based around programming which are as far removed from skeuomorphism as you can get. But those are very much a niche product.
Also let's not forget that the old studios wouldn't have had anything akin to modern audio editors (Soundforge, Audacity, etc). That's a very modern concept. However because we have adopted the old play/stop symbols that have existed on audio hardware for decades, and because oscilloscopes have made us very aware of waveforms, audio editors often look skeuomorphic even when they're really not (or perhaps it makes more sense to say that they are skeuomorphic, but not out of design - out of necessity due to sound being a wave).
If you look at something like a 303 which was originally designed to be a bass guitar support for guitarists, and ended up being the sound of Acid House; you'd be less likely to produce that method of programming if it were set up like a standard synth.
It's not like the iOS Phone app icon, which depicts the outline of a style of phone handset many people below a certain age have never seen or laid hands on.
When setting up really complex sounds and devices, I can't imagine any other approach. How do you represent a device that contains, say, 10 sub-devices? Ableton makes it super clear to setup and inspect.
Unfortunately, it seems like few other companies agree with this approach and spend lots of effort drawing backgrounds and rendering knobs and switches.
I think it's a hold over from the days when to experiment with sounds, you actually did have to go plugging various cables in and playing with knobs.
Both are very good at only somewhat related tasks. But fanboyism always sucks.
No, only the iOS team did. And bets are still up to whether it was a good decision or a catastrophe for the iOS platform.
Normal users really don't prioritize the faux leather vs flat issue that much - for them features count more.
Look at the top 10 apps in the Mac App Store. That list is always dominated by Apple's applications like Logic and iWork because of this pricing strategy. Nobody else can afford to sell a DAW for $200 and make money. IMHO it's some kind of anti-competitiveness but I don't know if there's a term for it. Maybe it's just a fact of life when Apple owns and controls the entire software/hardware ecosystem.
Also, don't forget that most of the Apple Pro Apps came about because pretty much none of the creative market vendors were initially on board with OSX, that only happened later when they saw OSX grow.
Companies will find ways to compete. Just look at the $30-$50 apps that emulate stripped down versions of Photoshop (Acorn, Pixelmator) - yeah, they aren't near the full feature set of PS, but they get 90% of us what we need and for way less money. I'm sure audio apps already have some of this going on in the market.
Are many independent developers really in the business of creating DAWs anyway? There seem to be far more developing instrument/effect plugins. The more people that use DAWs, the larger the market for plugins becomes. The net effect for independent developers could be positive.
Besides, if independent developers cannot find a way to compete, perhaps they should reconsider their business. It's not like they're competing with Microsoft's monopoly in the 80s and 90s. There are many other platforms (some much more popular than Apple desktop) on which they can develop, and Apple won't compete with them there. That's still a huge potential market share.
Lots of people will need a new mac for this. I know I can't run it on my Mac Pro 1,1
Kicks off here: http://9to5mac.com/2012/07/23/mountain-lion-installed-on-a-m...
I haven't looked, but I bet the Microsoft equivalent is (will be?) dominated by their apps, like the Office suite. It's not unfair, it's just the reality of such markets.
A supermarket's home brand would probably also be the most successful brand in their stores, too.
Plus? No, _first_. Apple is a hardware company. They sell computers. Their software, while excellent and profitable, IMO exists only to sell more hardware.
All companies have a core competency & purpose. Everything else must feed that core; a product may be excellent on its own, but must still support the core. Deviate from that core, badness happens. Logic Pro is awesome on its own, but was created to give a niche a reason to buy into the Apple ecosystem, buy hardware, and buy more hardware.
[ADDED]
Thanks for adding those, I was looking at them after I wrote my question. Its kind of hard to know which is a solid option from the reviews and what I'm seeing online.
It also isn't Photoshop.
For example, if you want to record your band at home, you might have six microphones just to get started (vocals, guitar, bass, snare, kick, and drum overhead). Outboard limiters and microphone preamps are not out of the question.
On the other hand, if you do everything with software samplers and synthesizers, then you just need a computer, Logic, and some headphones.
Now you'll argue that a bottom of the barrel high end amateur grade mic might be only $50. But you'll still need cables, probably a preamp, some kind of (expensive) interface box to input 6 audio channels in phase (can't just plug in 3 stereo usb sound adapters... well, usually...). A decent stand or boom is probably $75 for a hunk of metal. Suddenly paying $50 for a cheap mic is false economy if the support infrastructure is setting you back $300... may as well buy a decent $200 class mic... to go with your $200 software.
Unless you're solely a vocal group you'll probably need to mic and input instruments.
My sister used to play the viola (more or less a big violin). A pro grade mic costs $400. Not a viola with a mic installed. Not a package deal of mic and cable and preamp and all that. No, just the custom designed weirdly mounted mic. Before permanent professional installation of course. This is probably an extreme, obviously its hard to mic a stringed instrument without screwing up the resonance sounds while the musicians face is inches away from the mic. I bet you could mic a brass instrument for a quarter the cost.
Never mind the fact that if you actually earn a living doing this, the Reaper license is $225 anyway.
P.S. I think the $50 for a cheap mic is too low, and $100 is the lowest you should pay (probably for an SM57).
P.P.S. There are lots of ways to mic a Viola, no need to get a special Viola mic.
You may not, but most of the productions, from the Billboard top-100 to independent stuff, are choke full of plugins. And a lot of "physical hardware" can't be told apart when A/B with quality plugins (Waves, UAD etc).
>You can get this to run a project on the cheap, but it's still going to cost you $1000+ for a good mic and +600+ hardware like compressors, limiters, equalizers, monitors, and mixing boards. Plus you have to get cabling, power conditioners and cases to hold and connect everything. My last "Home Studio" ran me nearly $10,000; Logic was the cheapest thing I had to buy and that's when it was around $700.
If you want to record Led Zeppelin, maybe.
For a 4-piece rock band, Logic, a mixing board, a audio interface, a pair of monitors, a few mikes, stands, rack unit etc, will do it for around $3000-$4000.
And for electronic music (including hip-hop), you can just make do with Logic, an audio interface, headphones, monitors, a MIDI keyboard and one-two mikes, for around $1500 total.
With that being said, it's not cheap if you add other things you have to buy, studio monitors, a fast computer, and good midi keyboard (and that's the minimum for a full in-the-box musician).
(And you'll probably want at least one more controller, whether a Launchpad-style thing, a fader box, or Akai pads.)
For MIDI work PT is several years behind Cubase, Logic and Ableton. Everybody has their own favorite. I've found Logic to fit my workflow very well and is not any less of a professional tool than the other DAWs I mentioned.
Logic btw is horrible for external midi or was at least up till version 9. I've lost count the times it mess's up with my virus ti.
LOGIC!!!
A proof of that is that android still doesn't have descent audio performance. Yet it is able to do everything else.
Scripter
Extensible plug-in that can process or generate MIDI data using standard JavaScript.
I'm probably the only person who's excited to code up my own Arpeggiators and Rhythm pattern generators...
Does it get scaled in specific patterns or is random ok?
Just a tad faster and the kick is more busy, but very much the same feel.
In general, I've been a Mac user for everything but production for over a decade and am so sick of keeping a Windows machine running for sake of production. I don't think I could switch over for EDM/hip-hop though, as my workflow is so engrained in FL Studio and I use so many advanced controls and features.
Switching is a serious pain, especially when music is a free-time hobby and you want to spend that time actually creating and not learning new tools and workflows.
My (perhaps naive) impression is that Logic seems to be more geared towards recording live music, while Ableton and Reason seem to be more geared towards creating music in the program. They can all do both (recording live and create), but that's just my impression watching their demo videos etc (perhaps describing it as "core strength" vs "geared towards" is more accurate?). I'd love to hear from someone who's actually used one/more of them.
First things first. What I quickly discovered was that Logic _sounds_ better. Just dragging in a sample from you desktop seemed to reveal that logic was processing it in a higher quality. A weird thing, and maybe it's placebo, but everytime I go back to ableton I notice this. Furthermore, the bottom line is, my productions just sounds better in Logic. Maybe it's the workflow it encourages, I'm not sure. All I know is that no serious audio engineer would use anything else than Pro Tools or Logic for a serious recording, and I agree. At least that's my experience.
Regarding Reason: In my opinion, it has some of the best synths in the business. Which is why i rewire into Logic. A couple of youtube tutorials on Thor and you'll be going strong.
Ableton, well, I don't care much for it. The only thing i really miss is how easy it is to manipulate audio in it. A lot of people talk about how fast it is, but the design always seemed to get in my way. Personal preference i guess...
Probably Live's biggest problem in this regard is that it doesn't make it as clear as it could that this kind of stretching is going on.
1. I almost never actually finished anything in it. That's a problem for me in general, but Reason exacerbates it. There are so many knobs to tweak, that I often ended up mired in the minutia of tweaking sounds. I found it hard to stay high level and focus on the music.
2. Compared to, say whaling on a real guitar or keyboard, I found Reason sounded very "dry" out of the box. To get something that didn't sound cheap or reedy, I had to do a lot of set-up: make a synth or two, wire them through a few effects and EQ, tweak everything, add some reverb, tweak some more. I felt like I wanted to decorate a cake, but Reason forced me to go out and thresh some wheat first. This level of control is really powerful if you're into sound design, but made it hard for me to make songs and music.
Of course, your mileage may vary. As far as fun toy to play with, though, Reason is a blast. I spent many a happy hour tweaking and playing with little loops.
It does take a bit longer but you have more control of how things fit in the mix.
They share some qualities, but as the name suggests, Ableton Live is really geared towards live performance use. Logic is more for straight-up production. I mean, people use Ableton Live for production, but I think Logic is more flexible overall. (Because it's simpler, though, Live may be friendlier for people just getting into digital audio production.)
Also, just check out the interfaces: Logic is more for precision work, Ableton is all about getting to your actions quickly, as would be super-necessary when performing live and every millisecond counts.
This accessibility made switch to Live (again) after several years of Logic usage. You'll get great results with both, but after all I realized I value Ableton's straight forward workflow.
And then there's also Max 4 Live, which enables a whole other world of extensibility and tweaking.
The only thing I miss is Logic's low latency mode which is useful if your project becomes big and you need to record another track late in the production progress.
To do this you can "freeze" a collection of tracks in Live. It essentially locks every action you've applied to a track (and perhaps even quietly renders them to temp WAVs) in order to free up computing power.
Specifically, I'm talking about having one "knob" or control that controls multiple parameters across multiple VSTs, with varying ranges. Can Reaper do that? The fact that Ableton can, and Cubase can't, is pretty much the only reason I'm thinking of switching.
Edit: Clarifying a poor use of a pronoun.
Ableton recently decided not to work on bridging 32 Bit plugins too and I really prefer them and Apple to spend their resources on other issues.
Hardware and the OS are their secret sauce, commoditizing everything else (applications, services, content) is in their best interest.
As far as I remember, for the past 3 years, every app put into those stores by Apple themselves received unlimited upgrades.
Everybody wanted to do paid upgrade, pressuring Apple into adding some paid upgrade feature into the store. Apple always declined, saying "do as we do, support unlimited upgrades, you'll earn enough because the market is growing".
Some devs did paid upgrades by creating a new app with a new name, creating some issues along the way (people that just bought the old version a day ago have no upgrade path etc.) Not idea.
People guessed that Apple would add some "paid upgrade" feature once they needed it themselves.
Now Apple decided for the first time to create a paid upgrade, and apparently they - just created a new app...
Apple could have done better here.
AppShopper also automatically started tracking them as 2 items:
hopefully this means they got rid of the ridiculously over-complicated extraterrestrial-looking synth interfaces in favor of something that actually makes sense.
I've only just started tinkering with the "little brother" Garage Band program, but I was disappointed how bad support was for the pitch bend wheel from my keyboard into the supplied patches. (using pitch bend would cause secondary "note on" events which never got a "note off")
The built-in iPad remote control is cool though. Neyrinck makes a good one for Pro Tools, however: http://www.neyrinck.com/v-control-pro
[EDIT] Nope, the Environment is still there, my bad!
"The Logic Remote app lets you wirelessly pair your Mac and your iPad — giving you the freedom to control Logic Pro from anywhere in the room."
Having audio buttons I push with the mouse always seemed silly, but when I get to use my fingers it seems at least not as bad.
Music people eat that up. It's entirely the right choice, and the rest of the interface is clean. There are no problems here, just good design overall it seems.
Speaking as a longtime user of both physical audio gear and audio software (not to mention one of the "music people"), I think there is a big problem: knobs.
Knobs don't translate well to the screen. It's hard to do a twisting motion with the mouse or a finger on a touch screen. So a lot of programs just make them a kind of compact slider/fader -- you move the mouse up and down, and the knob turns. This is an interaction that can have some problematic interactions with scrolling and/or screen real-estate availability even after you've figured out how this works. And it's not exactly intuitive.
And there's often just better ways to do things. For example, I'd be happy if I never saw another EQ knob again in software -- being able to visualize/tweak a spectrum envelope is a clear winner over having to twiddle knobs. Or heck, I'd rather have MAX or pd's box-value compact faders that I can enter values into (along with sliding the mouse up and down) than knobs.
I know the familiar is often fun and feels accessible, I even know there are sometimes where the compact-fader thing is helpful. I just think knobs are way over used in software and it is a problem.
But it's hard to beat a UI that not only feels accessible, but is accessible if you've used the (often famous) hardware in real life, and not only that, teaches you how to use it so that if you ever encounter that specific pedal or this effects unit in reality, you have some clue of how it works. Maybe it's not a concern and I'm making this shit up, but it is at least a cool advantage.
[0] http://www.macworld.com/article/2044283/logic-pro-x-loses-no...
[1] http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/07/16/review-logic-pro-x/
[2] http://www.macprovideo.com/hub/review-2/logic-pro-x-review-t...