An alternative to Logic

[stag]

I mean, MIDI is *probably* less important these days to a higher percentage of people than it once was. Sure, most of us use MIDI keyboards and controllers, but more and more people don't have huge real-time MIDI rigs to control, instead doing more audio and virtual type stuff. Apple kicked SoundDiver under the carpet, I'd hate to see them dumb down Logic's MIDI capabilities.

Sorry bouta ask, but if you take MIDI out of logic you end up with what?
A underspec multitracker designed to run lots of plugs with a 400mhz CPU?

well it can float around inserts for the insecure\experimental kind. What about rendering, offline process, full PDC, well automation is a lot dependable of MIDI, mouse perhaps on some cases, on SX for the brave enough to configure generic remote may end up with really mind blogging setup... okay real pros don't have to do it just hire some dude to set it up and run it, it's worth the trouble anyway... just like side chaining in SX, hard as rocket science but one have to do it once and save it on the default project or enviromment like Logic heads like to put it.

Bye.

[beej]

I never said "take MIDI out of Logic". I said, I hope Apple don't dumb down the MIDI side of Logic, and I said that MIDI probably isn't as central to the music making process as it once was, for a lot of people.

In the late 80's/early ninetines, making electronic music largely meant a MIDI synth rig. Nowadays, plenty of people simply work with audio in software, with very little MIDI use apart from maybe some conroller stuff.

Of course there's still people out there with synth rigs and modules and stuff. I myself have a few, although I'm slowly cutting down on the hardware I own...

Edit: nice to see this thread picking up and becoming interesting again.

[jens]

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=149437

[derek]

guess its a pretty good program, you usually hear mostly good stuff about it. damn fanboys ;-)

It's been around longer than Cubase or Logic, maybe longer than Sonar? I used Performer in 86! They had a huge chance to take over the native market according to the Bomb Factory developer, but took a few wrong turns in 2001 or so. I switched to Logic then, because of a few bugs DP had at 2.7. Took longer than anyone else to switch to OSX, and by that time Apple had marketed Logic as the! DAW to use with a mac!

Since then DP keeps on adding things I like, so I'm curious to see how it's turning out? The Melodyne type stuff is definitely appealing to me.

As a side note, it wins hands down the contest for easiest to look at, uncluttered GUI out there.

i guess i dont agree with the bomb factory guy here - the program choice of most logic and nuendo users i know goes way back into the early nineties. most people are a lot more "glued to their daws" than they would like to admit. myself included, of course, allthough, while i absolutely hate it when i find out that a studio can only offer logic or protools, in the long run i should be happy about that, cause it widens the horizon in a way (read: it gives you more stuff to write in wishlists to terrorize your own dawmaker ;-)

in that regard, i guess i would love to somehow stumble into a studio that only has DP for a while, but i guess theres not much chance that this is ever going to happen.


no, you know what, youre just playing with me. there IS NO DP! i herewith declare this my new conspiracy theory. digital performer here, digital performer there - its just a tool to make us paranoid whether out daws are good enough! it doesnt exist! aaaah!

http://vadercoaster.ytmnd.com/

ROFL you just made my day :-)

[beej]

Interestingly, I find DP's interface very cluttered, compared to Logic (which can actually be really simple). Also I find a lot of text and icons are on the side of too small, meaning it feels "fiddly" to me.

However, my experience with DP isn't exactly vast. It's definitely got a heavier processor footprint than Logic, and is visually more polished than Logic & PT, but it has some great audio features, especially in the latest major version.

I also like the fact that DP's audio tracks are polyphonic, so you can overlap regions and they both play - Logic just just goes "f u!" to an existing region and plays the overlapping one - strictly monophonic. Mostly not a problem, but overlapping regions without having to crossfade etc is a nice workflow feature.

I've got the PT M-Powered demo on here to use with my FW410 and my experience is that it's a horribly buggy mess of an application - so much so that I haven't really begun to do anything with it, and so i haven't got the chance to really find out it's nice features and workflow. Every time I go "let's give it another go" it drives me nuts, crashes, hangs and generally behaves in the way a DAW shouldn't.

It's a shame, because I was considering getting it as a way to get familiar with PT but given the state of the demo, I wouldn't want to pay any money for it. Maybe it's just my system...?

As for Bomb Factory - what ever became of ole Erik? - his posts were some of the most entertaining on the whole audio interweb...

[Sal Handsome]

guess its a pretty good program, you usually hear mostly good stuff about it. damn fanboys

It's been around longer than Cubase or Logic, maybe longer than Sonar? I used Performer in 86! They had a huge chance to take over the native market according to the Bomb Factory developer, but took a few wrong turns in 2001 or so. I switched to Logic then, because of a few bugs DP had at 2.7. Took longer than anyone else to switch to OSX, and by that time Apple had marketed Logic as the! DAW to use with a mac!

Since then DP keeps on adding things I like, so I'm curious to see how it's turning out? The Melodyne type stuff is definitely appealing to me.

As a side note, it wins hands down the contest for easiest to look at, uncluttered GUI out there.

Hi MW,
Motu was late to the OSX party but they more than made up for it. DP 5.1 has a great feature set. Some I would like to see in Logic too.
I read on some online catalogs the crossgrade is $400.00
Sal

[Sal Handsome]

guess its a pretty good program, you usually hear mostly good stuff about it. damn fanboys

It's been around longer than Cubase or Logic, maybe longer than Sonar? I used Performer in 86! They had a huge chance to take over the native market according to the Bomb Factory developer, but took a few wrong turns in 2001 or so. I switched to Logic then, because of a few bugs DP had at 2.7. Took longer than anyone else to switch to OSX, and by that time Apple had marketed Logic as the! DAW to use with a mac!

Since then DP keeps on adding things I like, so I'm curious to see how it's turning out? The Melodyne type stuff is definitely appealing to me.

As a side note, it wins hands down the contest for easiest to look at, uncluttered GUI out there.

i guess i dont agree with the bomb factory guy here - the program choice of most logic and nuendo users i know goes way back into the early nineties. most people are a lot more "glued to their daws" than they would like to admit. myself included, of course, allthough, while i absolutely hate it when i find out that a studio can only offer logic or protools, in the long run i should be happy about that, cause it widens the horizon in a way (read: it gives you more stuff to write in wishlists to terrorize your own dawmaker

in that regard, i guess i would love to somehow stumble into a studio that only has DP for a while, but i guess theres not much chance that this is ever going to happen.


no, you know what, youre just playing with me. there IS NO DP! i herewith declare this my new conspiracy theory. digital performer here, digital performer there - its just a tool to make us paranoid whether out daws are good enough! it doesnt exist! aaaah!

http://vadercoaster.ytmnd.com/

ROFL you just made my day

Hi Derek,
what does Nuendo offer compared to SX. I know it's more expensive, is it the same program with more features or a different animal?
Sal

[derek]

conspiracy! youre all making this up! but you cant fool me! ;-)


...er....about protools - theres only one "real" protools package, the TDM based one, and thats not so much because those DSPs rock - a PT HD 3 package, which costs quite a fortune already, feels about the same to me as say a decent single core athlon (which is a fast machine, yeah, but costs maybe 1/10th) and has not nearly as much performance as say a dualcore system with 2 UADS, which still costs only a fraction of the price - its because digi has the bad habit of crippling their native protools bundles to make their TDM stuff look better. it used to be just your average customer manipulation, but STILL selling native systems with a 32 track limit in times where even a supermarket pc can handle 128 tracks and then some is downright ridiculous. and their giveaway packages have a history of being troublemakers - anyone remember "protools free"? :-)

but, if you look at the one system where digi actually does its best to make it good and not to make it somehow-not-too-good-but-just-useable-enough, then what you see isnt all that bad. the audio editing with its religious "marquee for everything" approach is, while a lot better than logics audioediting, still pretty slow und uneffective, you cant customize protools at all and can get individual keycommands only via workarounds with OSX, the midi is still nowhere near that of "real" sequencers of course and its all very dry and unsurprising. OTOH, because of that, its also probably the easiest program to learn, and it does have a couple of very cool features. beat detective for one - while you can get real drums quantized equally fast in tools with modern audio editing (like nuendo), its just a handy tool to have and does the job only a little slower, but easier. the automation is nice and fast to edit with multifunction tools, routing is flexible and PDC works, and then theres the killer feature "playlists" - the one feature im really really jealous of. its a bit like a "track history", a close relative to nuendos multilane tracks and you could somewhat emulate it with foldertracks in logic, but here its just there, and so simple, efficient and perfect. no rocket science, just a good idea. every hostmaker should steal that feature :-)

[derek]

oh, nuendo is more or less the same as cubase, only with some additional postpro features most people dont need. think samplitude and sequoia, allthough cubase is definetly a lot closer to nuendo than samplitude is to sequoia.

the differences from the top of my head:

network working (work on the same project on two workstations and exchange/update tracks via simple and fancy "update track" buttons
more formats supported (cubase ends at 5.1 i think, nuendo does everything)
more conservative as far as betatesting and stuff goes (usually a new "nuendo 4.0" would follow a month or so after "cubase 4.0" and will have already all 4.01 and 4.02 fixes of cubase and some goodies)
comes with some of the surround authoring stuff i think (havent ever used it, while i mixed in surround many times i never "authored" the product that came out of this)
4 mixers instead of 2
looks better :-) no, really. really looks better.
comes with a free SX license so if you prefer being an early adopter and want the new version the day its out, you can do that, and projects are 100% compatible
some more video stuff, sony 9pin sync, inserting timecode in video streams, that kind of stuff. nothing to write home about if you only do work to some quicktime and mpeg files, but for a studio that gets tapes on a regular basis (TV/postpro) i guess its rather essential.


the story of nuendo is that it started out as serious audio daw, as a parallel product to cubase, with audio editing to challenge the "real daws". remember, those were the days were cubase VST and logic audio still seemed rather toylike in comparison to DSP systems and of course didnt get you as far on that 200 mhz CPU). so in a way steinberg started a new product line back then, later maybe realizing that it would be easier to give the brandnew nuendo all the must have midi features of cubase than to update cubases audio functions. a bit like windows 95 versus windows NT. so that resulted in windows XP errr i mean in cubase SX, which really was just nuendo with updated midi functions, SX 1 with all the essential midi stuff, SX 2 more or less closed the gap and also included most of the more nerdy midi specia lities (you know, "change every other notes velocity by amount X which is determined by control value Y, but only on wednesdays" and other stuff to die for :-)

bottom line - most people can do just fine with cubase SX. i personally like nuendo, i dig the "more conservative updating", i have use for the network stuff from time to time (say, projects where you have a lot of work to do in very little time - i once worked for a casting show...say no more ;-), and by far the most important factor, i like the way it looks better ;-)

[bduffy]

"change every other notes velocity by amount X which is determined by control value Y, but only on wednesdays"

Good one! I totally agree with those appraisals of Nuendo and PT, btw.

Actually, I think the mixer ratio is 5 mixers in Nuendo, 3 in Cubase.

[beej]

5 mixers? How does that work?

[derek]

well its just one big mixer of course, but one usual approach would be to configure the mixers so they display
different stuff, i.e. i have one for just audio tracks, one with a colleciton of all busses, one with all input channels
and aux returns and one with just VSTIs. no big deal, just avoids scrolling a bit.

5 now instead of 4? must have missed an update there :-)

[beej]

Oh I see...

[Sal Handsome]

well its just one big mixer of course, but one usual approach would be to configure the mixers so they display
different stuff, i.e. i have one for just audio tracks, one with a colleciton of all busses, one with all input channels
and aux returns and one with just VSTIs. no big deal, just avoids scrolling a bit.

5 now instead of 4? must have missed an update there

Very similar to how I set up my screensets.
Thanks for the Nuendo information.
Sal

[Sal Handsome]

As for Bomb Factory - what ever became of ole Erik? - his posts were some of the most entertaining on the whole audio interweb...

The guy managed to get banned on at least 4 audio forums I was reading at the time. Rumor has it he was making such a big noise on the DUC forums that Digidesign decided to buy his company out just to shut him up.
Sal