Apple Logic Express 8 Upgrade

List Price: $99.00 Discount Price: Too low to display

Features:

• Makes it easier than ever to translate musical inspiration into professional productions
• Includes all the functionality of Logic Pro 8 except for four high-end professional features--surround, TDM/DAE support, distributed audio processing (DAP), and support for high-end control surfaces
• 36 instruments from Logic Studio, including Ultrabeat drum machine, EXS24 Sampler, and ES2 synth
• 70 effects from Logic Studio, including Guitar Amp Pro, Ringshifter, and full-featured Pitch Correction
• Hundreds of channel strip settings and thousands of royalty-free Apple Loops so you can make incredible-sounding music right out of the box

Customer Reviews:

Sound, features and appearance improvements vs. Price [Posted on 2008-06-30]
This update erases all Logic 7 voices and provides a new set of improved tones, although some needed instruments have been dropped (an '80's Yamaha DX7 electric piano, e.g.). If you cloned your hard drive before the upgrade, and with a lot of work, you can import most of them back as 'Performance' channel strips, including the old 'Ubiquitous DX'. No guitar sounds can be imported from Logic 7 so all guitar tracks must be reconfigured. Despite the incredible amount of work it takes to properly transfer Logic 7 files using internal sounds into Logic 8, I still give this upgrade the highest rating. However, I won't upgrade Logic Express anymore unless Apple makes the transition process much easier.

Apple dropped the price of Logic Express by $100 with this version 8 and wants $100 for this upgrade from Logic Express 7 owners! If Amazon didn't offer it for a much lower price, I never would have bought it.

Excellent music composition software [Posted on 2008-08-24]
I do only amateur MIDI-based music composition, no audio recording. Thus I can't comment on the latter. For the former, however, Logic Express offers all the tools I need to edit MIDI-events, and access to the tools will feel natural to anyone already comfortable with the Mac-way of doing things. Garageband's capabilities as a MIDI-event editor are rudimentary, where as Logic Express's capabilities are extensive. This was the main reason that I left Garageband and switched to Logic Express.

For amateurs with little knowledge of the concepts of a software instrument and the choosing of its parameters to create a sound, Logic Express can appear to be formidable even though thousands (especially if you buy the assorted Jam Packs) of parameter choices are built-in. Understanding the software instruments in order to create your own sounds will require study and experimentation if you are new to this.

The only editing that appears to be absent from Logic Express (I've only seen it in the application, Vision, that died many years ago after Mac OS 8 was retired) is scale transformations; that is, given something written in a major scale, being able to semi-automatically transform it into a minor scale, or even esoteric scales, such as Phrygian, Lydian or Mixolydian.

And lastly, perhaps an unnecessary note of caution: just as you can't write a novel with Microsoft Word unless you have a story to tell and understand how to tell it, you can't write music with Logic Express (or any other music creation program) unless you understand enough about music to do so.

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