by Apple’s music division has been anything but idle the past several years, but it has focused largely on the GarageBand products for consumers and mobile users. The professional crowd has seen some updates (and a reduced price) to 2009’s Logic Pro 9, but very little else. Today that changes with the release of Logic Pro X, Logic Remote (a companion app for iPad), and MainStage 3 (Apple’s live-performance tool, sold separately).
Those who’ve seen the Roman numeral X slapped onto Final Cut Pro may approach this release with some initial trepidation. Has Logic Pro been stripped of vital features to make it more accessible to GarageBand users? Is Apple abandoning professional audio engineers and musicians to cater to the prosumer user?
No and no. While Logic Pro has indeed adopted some of the look of Final Cut Pro X—with its dark visage and panes that can be invoked or dismissed as the mood strikes—Apple’s digital audio workstation (DAW) has lost none of its power and gained valuable features on just about every front.
What’s required
Logic Pro X is available only through the Mac App Store and costs $200. This is for both new and existing users of Logic—no upgrade pricing applies. Your Mac must be running OS X 10.8.4 or later, and you’ll want at least 35GB of storage if you plan to install all of the optional content (you can get by with 5GB for the default Logic Pro X installation). You should also make sure that any plug-ins you wish to use are 64-bit: With this version of Logic Pro, Apple has bid farewell to 32-bit plug-ins. There’s no bridging utility to allow those older plug-ins to work, so they are entirely incompatible with the application. But the new version hasn’t entirely abandoned the past. Projects created as far back as Logic 5 can be opened with Logic Pro X.
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