I see it in all facets of life: Zero information breeds hope, fantasy, wishes, rumour, lies, bullshit, faith, speculation etc...
Seriously, I wouldn't even give a damn about the lack of information if Logic was treated like a "Pro"(fessional) program. Which, at least IMHO, it isn't anymore. Yes, it still *is* a professional program, on my current setup it's running very stable and extremely efficient, fine so far.
But on the other hand, there's still quite some outstanding bugs, some of them more or less brandnew (such as the messups the take folders can create, which I would even call a "mission critical" affair), some ages old.
Then there's still the good old, usually unreasonable overload messages almost everybody sees from time to time (of course there's a reason for that message, but then this reason needs to be adressed).
And finally there's an absolute lack of new features, let alone any "revolutionary" ones. Let's face it, Logic 8 has merely been an interface-lifting (and in quite some areas it's been for the worse IMO), not much technically "new" core features have been introduced. Maybe there's good reasons for that as well, such as nobody being able to squeeze anymore functions into what seems to be a really blown up code, which would better need some hefty cleaning, if not being rewritten from the scratch (at least that's sort of what my spies told me...), so it must be a rather frustrating situation for some people in Rellingen as well.
And I could as well imagine the situation to be even more frustrating for what I think could be a team of young, enthusiastic Garageband programmers, which probably need to hold back great features because otherwise GB projects wouldn't be compatible with Logic anymore.
But in the end, as much as I may understand potential issues and certain conflicts, this still doesn't help me much as a user. Understanding some things may help me gain a little additional patience, but that's about it.
As far as Logic goes, us loyal users should be supplied with what should better be a substantial update, finally at least catching up with certain featuresets that you find in each and every other "name" sequencer, better even adding something which really makes people "wow", so the current treatment could be forgiven.
As is, the direct competitors are taking over, regardless of what area of sequencing you look at. Even in areas where Logic once has been known as being the absolute best (namely anything to do with MIDI), others have a way more comprehensive featureset by now, especially Cubase, just to name MIDI plugin compatibility and the absolutely kickass articulation functionality straight in the piano roll, which should be an immense thing for those working with larger sample libraries. The latter is something in the veins of what I expected a Logic update to come with, but as is, they will at best score second.
Same with anything audio. I won't repeat how much Logic lacks in that department, even regarding some of the most basic things, but others are by now coming up with Melodyne-alike editing (Cubase, Samplitude, Sonar) - I'd actually expect Apple/Logic to be the first to come up with things like that, not the last.
Ok, admittedly, it has always been that, say, Steinberg had a little "technological advance". They introduced ASIO and VST and it took Logic quite a while to catch up. But in the end, it was even working better, so your additional patience was rewarded. It's not like that anymore. They're not catching up anymore at all. In fact, it's the opposite. Something everybody was really stunning about when Logic 8 was released was the price drop and the amount of (partially very good) content in form of plugins and patches. Now just have a look at what Steinberg did. They added both plugins (namely their new convolution reverb) and content, lowered the price, *and* they added some additional technical novelties.
With Logic, all we've seen since 1.5 years is two mini updates, not even adressing some of the most crucial issues (such as the mentioned take folders).
It's especially the lack of bugfixes and smaller updates which seems to annoy people the most (at least most people I know). I mean, let's suppose there'd be a kickass major update coming one day. Will it be bugfree? Certainly not (that'd be an absolute first and as unlikely as it gets). So, how should I feel confident that these bugs will actually be fixed? They're not releasing any bugfixes anymore (I think that's a valid statement now that the last update is close to celebrating its first birthday), why should I believe this would change all of a sudden, just because a new major version was released?
Even a company such as Steinberg, having really gained some reputation for notoriously bad support, is doing a lot better than Apple/Logic these days.
I mean, you can only do better than zero support, no?
Regards
Sascha
