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Does the competition have an influence on Apple Logic pro updates?


stratquebec

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I used to use it before and during the early VST versions (3.5-3.7 etc), and through to SX2, then i went Logic 100% in the years since. Came back to Cubase version 9 (AI) as it came with Yamaha synth i bought, but was never a fan of it - but that's cause it lacked the features i needed.. But went from AI to elements and kept it upgraded in the hope that an offer to Pro would come up.

 

It's only since only the Pro version in this 50% sale (10) that i can see it's true appeal - without the variaudio/comping components etc. it's just not the same beast. And that's kinda where i am with it.

 

So honestly, i've played around with it for a number of years, but only seriously using it for past month - even back in the VST/SX days it was just for recording the band. I never really knew much about mixing then, but maybe the early use has made using it easier perhaps?! Cause i'm loving in so far! :)

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Since this thread became more a Cubase Vs Logic than anything else - and that's perfectly fine with me - maybe give Studio One 4.5 a little room in this thread.

 

I complain about Logic's X missing chord track feature and would love to see a Cubase like chord track feature soon implemented in Logic but so far, no good.

 

Then I recently fall on a Studio One 4 chord track video and... Wow! It's even more advanced than Cubase since it can detect and modify chords in audio files too, not just MIDI! Sure it's not perfect, but that can be very helpful to explore differents chords progressions in a song.

 

So I would like to see Apple to that Studio ONe Chord Track sort thing the Apple way, which is most of the time, always better than the competition!

 

And I cannot praise enough the Logic's Drummer. No other daw has a feature like this one.

Edited by stratquebec
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Here is are some test results I did this week. It started out as a performance test of VePro7 vs VePro6, but ended up a comparison of Logic, Cubase and DP; with and without VePro. Explanation follows.

 

Full Spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JrSeZ9nBh-28BdKPhPGv2SUjCP0QCnURCuc2aeHeOEk/edit?usp=sharing

 

pubchart?oid=1127774306&format=image

 

Procedure

 

  • 90 track score from VSL's website was used as test project. This contains 90 tracks of ViPro, with MirPro on each track and Miracle reverb on the master bus.
  • The same 90 track score was used in all cases, and every attempt made to optimize each DAW to similar optimized settings
  • Audio Buffer of 1024 or larger used in all cases.
  • Score was played through same section of score, for 3 minutes, sampling the average CPU % every 3 seconds, using following command line, started at same point of score playback:
    iostat -w 3 -I -c 60

 

Summary

 

Most of the situations tested averaged around 35% cpu usage over the test. You can see a cluster of graph lines, some slightly better or worse then others, but all reasaonbly close and acceptable in performance, both with and without VEP. The two outliers are Cubase, which performed poorly, especially without VEP; and LPX alone which performed 10% better alone then when combined with VEP. (See below)

 

  1. LogicPro alone: wins cpu-war with the greatest efficiency, using 25% average cpu usage.
  2. LogicPro+VEP: 34% average cpu
  3. StudioOne+VEP 33% also did very well, even beating slightly LogicPro.
  4. StudioOne alone: 35% average cpu
  5. Cubase+VEP: 49% average cpu usage.
  6. Cubase10 alone: could not play more than 15 seconds without dropping audio entirely, can't complete the task. I tried every possible combination of buffer sizes, ASIOGuard, etc, it will not play the score.
  7. DP9+VEP: 38% avg cpu
  8. DP9 alone: 35% average cpu. Audio buffer at 2048. Also tried DP10 which performed 5% worse then DP9 and the GUI as extremely laggy compared to DP9, so there is that.

 

System Specs

 

  • MacPro 5,1 12 cores x 3.33ghz, 128gb ram, OSX 10.14.5 (Mojave), RX580 video
  • LogicPro 10.4.4
  • Cubase 10.0.20
  • StudioOne 4.5.1
  • DP 9.52
  • VEP 7.0.826
  • Audio Buffer at 1024

Edited by Dewdman42
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Then I recently fall on a Studio One 4 chord track video and... Wow! It's even more advanced than Cubase since it can detect and modify chords in audio files too, not just MIDI! Sure it's not perfect, but that can be very helpful to explore differents chords progressions in a song.

 

Yeah Studio One was my destination for Mac/Win crossplatform - but lack of SysEx and PolyAT is a killer for external synths and tracking V Drums so i sold the license (i've bought it twice and sold it twice now - duh!), but we got it in local studio where i help a friend so i get plenty of use with it - he's basically all presonus gear, and it's a nice setup integrated.

 

Presonus polyphonic detection is really good on their chord algorithms too! I do prefer Cubase's implementation as a tool though, it seems better for sitting down and composing if you know your direction, whereas Studio Ones implementation is much stronger for adjusting what you have already got.

 

I mean, you can just strum a load of C Majors in on guitar and use it's Chord track to play back that strum in whatever chord progressions you want - good fun, but end result isn't really useable - fantastic ideas machine though! I use Cubase harmonies generator in the same way, let it generate then use the output as a template for the actual vocals. :)

 

Studio One is great, lovely to use, and the 4.5 update has improved it once again.. If only it didn't lack crucial MIDI elements, damn! CPU performance is really stepped up in 4.5 too.

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In my tests with Cubase10, what I can say is that with 5-10, tracks, 20....performed fine. Can't really perceive a difference. Past 20 tracks you start to notice that its using more Cpu then the competition. After 50 it really struggles. At 75 it would simply not play the project through no matter what I did. And I tried everything, because i paid full price for my Cubase10 and I really want to try using it! But sadly, the performance with Cubase on a mac is really really underwhelming. At least on my 5,1 Mac Pro. its possible it may do substantially better on a newer CPU with faster single cores, faster memory, etc.

 

Using VepPro7 with Cubase helps a lot, you can see from the results, its still the worse result I got, but at least with VePro it would play the score all the way through and sounded great. If I wanted to get more into Cubase I would definitely use VePro, and probably I would setup a VePro slave machine.

 

I have not noticed GUI sluggishness with Cubase like others have reported, maybe a little bit, but not that terrible. LogicPro has the best GUI experience in my view, hands down. DP10 actually had an unusable GUI sluggishness for me, DP9 was much better, but still kind of laggy compared to both Cubase and LogicPro.

 

I started to do a test with Reaper, but was immediately overwhelmed by Reaper's complete lack of intuitiveness and so i will leave that for someone else. Maybe someday I will try out Studio One also.

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Presonus polyphonic detection is really good on their chord algorithms too! I do prefer Cubase's implementation as a tool though, it seems better for sitting down and composing if you know your direction, whereas Studio Ones implementation is much stronger for adjusting what you have already got.

 

For whatever, I experienced prolonged note release weirdness when using the Cubase chord track. Not so with S14.x. Fewer chord structures to select from but more rebust performance. Regarding chords, I acuired knowledge of jazz chord formulas and four string fingerings at age 13. Chord apps can be useful when restructuring audio and MIDI but aren't required for generating chord progressions here, fun yes, but not required. Having said that, at my age, a good refresher is always appreciated.

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Ah, so you're part of the Rick Beato club eh? :)

 

See, for me the chord track is less about creating progressions and more about documenting them. As i fly between projects like the wind it's just nice to have all that within the project within the arrangement markers at the top- and the way Cubase works really encourages me to work with the Chord Track in that way.

 

Then, it's there for creating vocal harmonies later in the progress of the song, or helps ideas on where to go with lead parts, making vocals parts more interesting or polishing a bridge or lead up to a chorus. So many times in the past week i've decided to use variaudio to play with vocal parts and surprised myself with the results, and then re-recorded vocals based on those experiments - it's just great, you get the green, blue and red highlights to help know if you're within the scale of the chord progressions - very handy.

 

Not having to keep re-recording/performing sections just makes everything feel more deliberate and targeted before putting some actual takes down. That is the big difference i'm taking from Cubase vs Logic and i'm loving it.

 

One other thing, if i'm working on a song it's super easy to print the chord progressions out and use them to practise on my guitar in the house and modify them - and then adjust the project based on that noodling. Otherwise, i usually got so much going on, i forgot ideas i have if i can't get them down!

 

And yeah, i know what you mean with the prolonged notes - an example is if i drag the chord track down into a VSTi lane the notes of the final bar seem to extend out.

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To each their own. I find TM more than adequate, but I'm also in the habit of saving point in time versions of my music projects and not working on something as revision-volatile as being discussed.

 

Still, what I'm hoping for in the future is the infinite undo/redo model to take hold in applications There was a text editor called Write! that I reviewed once upon a time, 2015 I think, that allowed you to undo back to a blank page and redo up to your last typing no matter how many sessions were involved. That's obviously far easier with a text editor that with a lot of other software, but with the massive amounts of CPU power and disk space/speed available to us now, I don't see why it can't be done. If you have undo at all, you should be able to concatenate the data from various sessions and make it infinite.

 

This is basically what TM is on a global basis, but as pointed out, it's not as granular as some people require. Sorry, just thinking out loud.

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I wish Apple had adopted the incredible non-destructive undo history of Soundtrack Pro. That thing was absolutely genius. For those who don't remember it, you had a history of actions performed onto an audio file, for example the whole thing had a reverb applied, then EQ'ed, then normalized, then time-stretched, then a few clicks were removed, then a section was silenced, and at that point you realized you wanted a different reverb: you could simply double-click the "Reverb" action in the history and readjust the reverb plug-in. Once done, every further action would automatically be re-applied, respecting the action history. You could simply uncheck an old action to have it removed and all of the more-recent actions were automatically re-applied....

That was truly a magical workflow, and I can't believe it was forever gone along with Soundtrack Pro. :(

 

Soundtrack-Pro.png.78253189b314fdc80df54493d88bd830.png

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I wish Apple had adopted the incredible non-destructive undo history of Soundtrack Pro. That thing was absolutely genius. For those who don't remember it, you had a history of actions performed onto an audio file, for example the whole thing had a reverb applied, then EQ'ed, then normalized, then time-stretched, then a few clicks were removed, then a section was silenced, and at that point you realized you wanted a different reverb: you could simply double-click the "Reverb" action in the history and readjust the reverb plug-in. Once done, every further action would automatically be re-applied, respecting the action history. You could simply uncheck an old action to have it removed and all of the more-recent actions were automatically re-applied....

That was truly a magical workflow, and I can't believe it was forever gone along with Soundtrack Pro. :(

 

Soundtrack-Pro.png

 

Totally agree! That's what Logic's selection based processing should look like!

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On the topic. After 10 years on the Mac and Logic i had to move on to Windows after my iMac's graphics card died. Windows is surprisingly good nowadays. And Studio One runs so much better on it. And S1 becomes so good that i'm mixing exclusively in it. It's ARA implementation is really incredible. Now that 4.5 is out Alchemy and some nostalgia perhaps seem to be the only things making me hold on to Logic for producing. I hope that Logic team is preparing something really outstanding for the next release, considering they had missed their scheduled one in January. May be we'll see 11 (or whatever they call it) soon, who knows :)
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  • 8 months later...

All I want in logic is the ability to move tracks in the mixer and have them align the same order where I’m recording.

 

I like logic but Cubase will always be at the front because the company constantly upgrading the product. Logic is one major upgrade every few years. I wish Apple put more time into it.

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A lot changed since the release of Logic Pro X. Then there was Cubase Logic Protools as main players.

With the popularity of commercial EDM and later Trap-Hiphop Ableton Live And FLStudio re-gained huge popularity among new starters due to youtube videos of artists plus being easy to put stuff down, the immediacy etc. I think the real competition is these two plus Studio One which I think is mostly a better thought out version of Logic/Cubase. I observe Cubase mostly keeps it's old customers or gains from advanced users of other DAWs but I do not think it is attracting new generation that much unless they want to get into media composing etc. Logic is still great and popular and have the potential to attract new comers but have a lot to catch up.

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