Apple Releases Logic 7, New Jam Packs

RadRafe writes "Apple today introduced Logic Pro 7 and Logic Express 7. Logic Pro now features Distributed Audio, a clustering tool (Xgrid-based?) to exploit the DSP power of multiple Macs, and Sculpture, the long-awaited component-modeling synthesizer. Also out today are two new Jam Packs for GarageBand - though they work in Logic too, now that Logic supports Apple Loops."

Comments

As a Logic Platinum user

[mcc]

I'm honestly kind of pissed about the bug fixes thing. I bought the top-of-the-line version of Logic when 6 came out. Shortly afterward suddenly they redid the pricing structures so there's no longer a Platinum, just a Pro and an Express. A year later I find that they're issuing updates to Pro 6 that they aren't issuing to Platinum 6, even though on would expect these to be the same product. Meanwhile despite them being introduced not long after Logic 6 I still can't use Cocoa-view AudioUnits, a basic feature which you'd think Apple would support in their own software and a feature which I need. Now that 7 is out I can pretty much be guaranteed that Cocoa-view audiounits are not coming to Platinum 6, no?

Re:"Scale out"

[BWJones]

This actually is a *BIG* thing. Built in distributed computing infrastructure that is easy to enable without a ton of scripting and custom coding has been a holy grail of distributed computing for a while. Programs like Pooch from Dean Dauger have helped considerably, but distributed computing built into applications that take advantage of an OS supported computing "grid" are another level entirely. Certainly folks that use film rendering and such can benefit, but so can users of Photoshop, not to mention a whole cadre of folks in scientific computing (like myself) for image analysis and clustering analysis (of images) and molecular simulations, particle based modeling etc...etc...etc...

Re:Very busy user interface

[andrewjhall]

I used to use Logic on Windows (when that was available). It's a grade A nightmare to use. Even the musicians I know struggle with it. It can do nearly everything you could possibly imagine, but it'll make you pay for it every step of the way. I never got very far without my head in the manual, which was a serious blow to my geek credibility (in front of pretty musician I was setting it up for I might add)....

Re:Kind of like...

[rco3]

And, of course, there are the experiments done by (IIRC) Pioneer with a cobbled-up double speed DAT machine in which samples of Harmon-muted trumpet, which has significant harmonic content past 20-30 kHz, were played by for test listeners. EEG's indicated that the brain activity differed between recordings bandlimited to 20 kHz and recordings which contained the higher frequency content. None of the listeners could hear the difference, but they appeared to respond to it nonetheless.

What the underlying cause and effect were, I don't know.

Personally, I'd feel pretty confident that a 24/96 medium, with relatively sharp Nyquist filters, would qualify as being completely transparent compared to the rest of the signal chain. There certainly aren't going to be many mike/preamp combinations exceeding 120 dB s/n!

I suspect that the use of a 192 kHz sample rate allows for both extended bandwidth past the conventionally accepted limits of human hearing, and for shallower, gentler Nyquist filtering. The sampling's certainly cheap enough now, unlike 1983 when most CD players used 14-bit D/A converters!