I'll let you know what I think of it over the next few days. Inital reports from friends who've had it for 24 hours are all extremely favourable.

OK, I've been messing around a bit

Timestretch from the arrange page:

You select a region of audio, then select a region for it to stretch into.
Some numbers appear and whizz around a bit...
Then the old audio is replaced with the new audio immediately
There are quite audible artifacts even using one of the 5 different methods available, but hey, it works! For the odd bar here and there quite invaluable.

Freeze:

This is nothing short of a revolution.

I took a track running lots of VST plugs that was at 96% dsp - any more and it was going to go down.

I 'froze' 12 EXS24 tracks (that's the Logic Sampler if you didn't know) which had a bit of compressiong and eq on each.

Pressed play...and this is where it starts. Logic 'works out' by zipping along the arrangement all frozen tracks at once, meaning you can freeze a whole bunch of tracks, hit play, and then let Logic do it's thing.

Anyway, plays back fine, sounds identical...25% cpu drain showing. Down from 96%!

Mental. This means you can run better and more draining plug ins that previously you wouldn't have bothered with.

I can't tell you how incredibly cool this is.

Hide tracks:

A little H has appeared at the top of the arrange page next to the link button. When you click it, lots of H buttons appear next to each track. When you click those they go blue. When you click the H at the top again, all those tracks vanish. Press the H again and they appear again.

Useful.

Channel Strip in Arrange:

Ok, at first this seemed like a good idea. Myself and many friends have for some time been using screen sets where we use a floating window on the left hand side of arrange under the parameters to show the currently selected track. This attempts to take the fiddliness out of that.

But

When you double click on an output, send or otherwise, it doesn't take you there. Which was the whole point, our way you could whizz around the environment without leaving arrange.

Hopefully Emagic will resolve this.

Sample accurate arrange page:

Yup, it's true. When you zoom into the arrange page, instead of getting lumpy waveforms they are all perfect. Hurrah.

Marquee tool:

This new tool lets you select any region of audio, snapping to the bar or not, and then lift it away without having to first 'snip' either side. And it works on multiple tracks/parts.

Good. No more 'select all' and then cutting one side then the other before moving a chorus across/whatever.

New Arrange Icons:

Quite funky. You can make your own as long as they're 128 X 128 pixels. Roll on customization. I'm going to make a porno set for this new film i'm working on.....



I'll post some more up later - right now the new project manager is scanning all the drives on my machine and correlating exact data on which files are connected to what, which you can view, save and annotate/write yourself reminders in.

This is a very cool feature and I'll get into it on my next post.

Bev

Still waiting for Logic project manager to scan all my files, it's on 26000 at the moment.

Thanks for the info Bevvyb...keep them thoughts coming.

I can't wait to purchase Logic late this year.

Bev, How does logic handle the freeze files. Are they visible in the audio window or anywhere else on the hard drive? This could be rather useful, at least for me since I started enjoying mixing in protools and bouncing each instrument from start to finish can sometimes take a whole day.
Is this the time saver I´ve been waiting for?

Regards,
Jens

To answer both your questions -

Yes Jens, this is the answer to your prayers (and mine!)

When you press freeze on a track, nothing visibly changes in the arrange page. As you soon as you try and edit anything that would otherwise change the sound of the track you either get a little snowflake symbol appearing on the cursor or a dialogue asking if you really want to revert back to the original with the plugin ins.

The audio track that Logic plays from is created in the background and doesn't appear anywhere.

However, these temprary files are stored in a folder in the song folder called 'Freeze Tracks'. They stay there until you un-freeze a track and it's relative file is deleted.

When you freeze a track Logic calculates the audio freeze data from the first bar of the song TILL THE END OF SONG POINTER.

So, even if there are no plug ins on tracks, and you froze ALL of the tracks in your song - there in your freeze folder is a complete bounce from start to finish of ALL YOUR SONGS TRACKS.

How f**king cool is that!

So yes, the days of one-bounce-at-a-time to get your session into Pro Tools or some other daw are gone.

The only thing you have to do is set a preference to make sure the freeze tracks are 24 or 16 bit and not the default 32 bit float.

NEW CHANNEL STRIP EQ:

In place of the eq button which would bring up a list of (fairly useless) eq plug ins which would show at the tops of an environment mixer channel, the channel Eq is a fully blown 8 band eq which takes up hardly any dsp as it is DOT optimised.

Before I go any further - I am now using this as my default eq and Renaissance has gone right out of the window. This Channel Eq sounds terrific, especially considering how low cpu drainage it needs.

A little box named 'eq' is at the top of every channel, and in the box you can see a thumbnail of the eq curve.

Double clicking on this box opens up an instance of Channel Eq in the first slot of that channel, if there are already plug ins there they get shunted down by one. You can also insert the Channel Eq anywhere in the chain, but the thumbnail always shows the first instance of Channel Eq should you have more than one on a channel.

This Eq is a PROPER eq. It is transparent, pleasant to listen to, and goes from very harsh to nice. The top end ACTUALLY WORKS.

Another cool feature is a button that turns on an analyser which shows the amplitude of all frequency components of the signal being passed through it. This moving waveform appears on the same screen in the background as the eq curves so you can see exactly what frequencies correlate to your own eq. You can view this moving graph post or pre, which means you can visibly watch the changes that your eqing are doing to the signal.

Wild.

Excuse me while I go through all the songs I'm working on and replace every eq with this one. It rocks.

Praise the Lord!!!! Thanks for the info.

Jens

Major thumps up!
I'll get my update next monday!
Looks like they now have some of the stuff we allways begged for!

Glad to hear you're enjoying 6, Bev!!!! Do you have LogicControl? Groups pretty much kick ass on a LogicControl system (as well as without!)

damn... DP has had batch processing since v2... well that was the first i bought into it, possibly had it before that. weird how certain apps have different things at different times.

like with PT, i dont like the fact it doesnt have multiple 'sequences' [songs, DP calls them chunks] within the same session. if you want to record the whole album in a single file you have to run down the timeline opposed to having a seperate sequence with different tracks, etc...

Logic has folders. You select a bunch of tracks/parts whatever, hit folder and they all dissapear into a folder - it looks like a part but goes grey and is called a folder.

If you double click on the folder you go into the folder and you only see stuff in there. Close the window and you go back to the main arrange page.

You can then 'unstuff' these folders when you like.

Is that what you mean alpha?

And no, Logic does not have batch processing. I would assume that because Apple has bought Emagic they will open up Logic to become entirely Applescrtiptable which will mean ANYthing will be possible as regarding batch stuff, import/export, file swapping between apps etc. Well, here's hoping anyway. I've wanted to write Applescripts for Logic for years.

Now I want batch processing. Damn.

The problem is the only thing I can think of is Aaahnold in that godawful blue getup telling everyone to "Freeeeze..."

But seriously...

Hats off to the cats at emagic for creating the next revolution in native processing.

I just can't believe my good fortune to be introduced to the world of DAWs with Logic... even before it's logic "audio" days...

I can't wait a bit... gonna get mine RIGHT NOW!

Later.

Thanks for this interesting report BevvyB.

Yes, Logic's folders and heirarchical arrange page are much cooler than DP's chunks. Chunks follow the old drum computer paradigm.

Unfortunately, nobody equals what Studio Vision Pro had before Gibson killed it. In SVP, each subsequence could have an independent conductor track, and multiple subsequences could overlap. That was really great, and I'm beginning to think that we'll never, ever see something quite so advanced in another daw application.

Lee Blaske

No problem. It'll cost you a Thai meal.

i dunno about that folders dealio... doesnt sound like what i use chunks for, or would want to do. and in DP, each chunk can have a seperate conductor track... each chunk is independant of each other... overlapping, cant do that but i dont need it to do that.

what i use chunks in DP for is i track a whole album/project in one session. each chunk is a song. within each chunk, there are multiple takes [if needed]. this lets me mix the album without having to close and open another session and lets me switch between songs really quickly. it also doesnt require me to overwrite a template for basic tracks and copies the previous sequence tracks. makes for quick tracking.

maybe thats what folders do but i would rather have batch processing, and undo history...

I'm a PC user and i think i'm going to cry.........sniff

Logic has infinite undo since version 5 - and now I can't believe I ever worked without it

I'm off on hols till Monday - if anyone else has Logic 6 feel free to take up where I left off!

Next week the drivers I need come out so I will be putting Logic 6 through its paces in OSX.

Are there any big logic forums on the net? I want to check out more feedback.
Thanks.

http://community.sonikmatter.com/cgi...ultimatebb.cgi

infinite undo... or history undo. with history undo, you can go backwards and fowards in time... at any point. go back a few, branch off... go foward, branch off there.

Bev, thanx for the ace reportage.

Can anyone report on OSX vs. OS9 performance w/ Logic 6? I've heard mixed reports regarding ProTools 6 under OSX... seems the fancy OSX grafix put a significant strain on your computer. I'd hate to think that Logic under OSX represents a step backwards in terms of GUI snappiness and overall agility compared to OS9.

Any word?

I LOVE it!!!!!grggt
I LOVE the GROUPS!!!!!

alpha - history undo with a list like you say

OSX LOGIC RUNNING AUDIO UNITS DRIVERS FOR MOTU 2408

I don't for a minute pretend that the 2408 is a high end unit, but in its price range it has been arguably one of the better sounding and more versatile machines.

So, I just took a song I have been working on in OS9 and opened it up in OSX.

It sounds A HELL OF A LOT BETTER.

It was a bit of a surprise to say the least.

It was one of those differences we all go on about when were talking about sample rate, bits, apogee vs prism etc. The sound got more defined, wider, better imaging etc

Blimey.

Oh, the other thing was I started the song up, then booted up Explorer, opened Outlook, checked my email, and Logic just kept going.
When I finally did get it to stop by opening up even more apps, it just sat in the background.

When I went back to it and pressed play it just started again. I guess the only reason it stopped was because of all the disk access I was throwing at it.

The thought of not being able to crash this thing really does appeal to me.

More later.

I just managed to induce the first ever Kernel panic I ever saw on OSX using Logic...

It went completely barmy.

Whether it was to do with the new drivers or OSX itself I guess I may never find out.

What I will say is this. When using project manager in OSX everything runs a lot smoother and MUCH faster, probably because of the way that OSX manages files so much better than OS 9.

I will have to agree that on the whole the screen refresh is not as fast as it was on OS9 as some users using Pro Tools 6 have noted.

The sound quality increase has led me to leave some of my songs in OS9 and suffer using only the Emagic plug ins. On acoustic only tracks there seems to be an advantage. If I were to do a dance tune I would definitely stick in OS9.

The kernel panics are definitely because of MOTU's drivers. My system was rock-solid until I installed those drivers. I won't be using the 2408s in OSX until the drivers are updated.

I had a very rapid response from MOTU regarding kernel panics.

I quote:

******

Can I get a little information on your system?
Mac model and processor speed -
OS X version -
Card Version - this is found on the label on the bottom of the card
RAM configuration - how much and how it's configured(ie 1 gig via 512 x
1/256 x 2 etc)

A few things to check:
Is the MOTUPCIAudio.kext inside of System->Library->Extensions?
Do a search for the MOTUPCIAudio.kext to make sure that there is only
one installed in the system.

Open Terminal and paste in the following:
sudo rm -R /System/Library/Extensions/MOTUPCIAudio.kext

and Press Return

You will be prompted for your password. Enter it and hit return. Quit
Terminal and run the MOTU PCI Audio Installer, select Uninstall from
the Install dialog box. After complete, restart the machine. Then run
the installer file again and restart.

If you continue to get a kernel panic, let me know. Make sure to put
ATTN: Jon in the subject line.

******

Anyway, I invited this Jon guy to come over here and talk about it

I don't have a double extension as he mentioned, and I guess this is something MOTU are aware of due to the speedy response.