The Null Device Blog

Apple annoucned at NAMM this year that they’re revamping the entire Logic line, from their Audio/Silver/Gold/Platinum + addons into 2 packages: Logic Express and Logic Pro. Pro is going to be platinum + all the addons, and it’s going to cost me about $200 to upgrade. Not bad, considering I’m getting about $1000 worth of software in the upgrade. Including the absolutely killer Space Designer convolution reverb.

A lot of people on the Logic Users-group are grousing about how they’re loyal customers and bought everything already and now they have to upgrade anyway. Well, that sucks, yes, but they’re a tiny minority. More people are complaining that emagic should fix the bugs in logic first. I agree that the bugs should be fixed, but then again this “upgrade” is really just a package revamp. Get free software, we’ll give you an upgrade soon enough. And on the grand scale of things, Logic’s bugs are nothing. When it crashes, it at least throws up a “try to save your song” error trap. And when it crashes, it crashes. It doesn’t hang the system completely. Having come from the world of Cubase on the mac, which hung every time the processor load got too high, I’m extremely grateful for the stability I’ve got.

In other news, I recently picked up Elemental Audio’s “Firium” and “Eqium.” Eqium is a nice parametric EQ with all sorts of features, and Firium is just…it’s just godlike. highly latent, so it only really works as a mastering EQ and not a track EQ, but it’s fully linear-phase, FIR 50-point graphical EQ with independent L/R EQing, an analysis and learning function, and a real-time spectrogram. AND it’s about $150, which is buttloads less than Waves comparable plugin. Hughly recommended to anyone who does mastering or wants to overall EQ their stuff.

The long road to OS X compatibility is almost at an end. Okay, sure, I had to buy the VST->AU wrapper in order to get some of the sluggish developers’ software to work, but as far as it goes, that’s the least of my problems.

Recent discoveries:
PSP’s entire Mixpack is very cool. I used to have just MixPressor, which was my favorite compressor (depsite the butt-ugly UI) but the addition of Mixsaturator has been very nice. I need to get the OS X version of VintageWarmer because it’s a damn fine multiband limiter at heart.

Elemental’s Eqium and Firium are sweeeeeet. Firium is a steal at the price – a learning, completely linear-phase EQ for $149? Hell, It’s got a lot more bands than Waves LinEQ and it’s about half the price. And there’s a logic-user-group group buy so I can get it reaaaal cheap.

Novation V-Station sounds awesome but is a total processor hog.

I’ve managed to crash Logic a few times now. But the nice thing about OSX is that I don’t need to reboot my machine when it happens. What I *do* need to do is figure out why I crashed it.

OS X audio is slightly slower than OS9 was, but doesn’t freak out on me as often. My system doesn’t lock up and drop al USB communication when I do too much audio processing. I’m hoping 10.3 addresses the speed issue. It’s not too bad, though.

So, yeah, I’m diggin it.