Friday, September 2 ♦ More Mac Nerdery
Highly Illogical

So let’s recap: as of this summer, iLife, iWork, and even Mac OS X are all available in the App Store. Four of Apple’s pro apps — Final Cut Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Aperture — are available as well. In the move, all of these apps have been upgraded or optimized for Lion and have seen price drops: iWork, once $80 and now available as separate $20 apps; iLife, also available as separate $15 apps; and more drastically, Aperture and Final Cut Pro, with $120 and $700 price drops and the latter in a completely overhauled form.

There’s just one app missing: Logic, Apple’s pro audio offering, untouched since it was upgraded in July of 2009. Granted, a two-year gap between pro app releases is not at all unusual. That’s the same length as Final Cut Studio, and the jump between Logic 7 and 8 was actually three years.

There is no word as to whether Logic will make the move to the App Store, but seeing as GarageBand is still around and that Soundtrack Pro was eliminated from Final Cut Pro, my guess is that it will. 1 The question on the minds of audio nerds is whether it will receive the FCPX treatment: that is, will it be rewritten from scratch, with a radically-different UI, throwing compatibility to the wind?

There’s obviously no way of knowing for sure until we see it announced, or scrapped, but my guess is it will be an incremental upgrade2, and nothing more:

  1. Final Cut Pro 7 was 32-bit and very much wrapped up in legacy code. Logic faces neither of these problems, taking care of a very compelling reason for a rewrite.

  2. Conceptually, GarageBand and Logic are very similar products. There is a natural progression from one to the other, so much so that there is an entire page dedicated to comparing the two apps. By comparison, iMovie bore absolutely no resemblance to Final Cut Pro until FCPX was released in June.

  3. Even outside the realm of Apple products, the way Logic functions fits in line with long-established methods of recording and mixing audio. Mixing audio in tracks has been the way to do things for decades. I love the trackless design for Final Cut Pro, but without getting nerdy about it, tracks are fundamental to the art of mixing audio in a way, to video, they are not.

  1. Final Cut Studio long included Soundtrack Pro in its offerings, so as to provide an audio and music solution for their pro video customers. As of June, it’s only available as part of Logic Studio. If Apple had pro photo and video apps, but scrapped their cornerstone audio apps and left only GarageBand, that’d be nuts. ↩
  2. There might also be a chance Soundtrack Pro is simply rolled into Logic Pro. That would be very clear and Apple-like, but having only minimal exposure to Soundtrack Pro, I don’t really know how different of an app it is. ↩
  3. I’m pretty sure this is the end of Logic Express though, much as it was for Final Cut back in June. Too convoluted to offer a middleman between iLife and the pro apps, and they were really only relevant when the full versions cost $500-$1000. ↩
Logic tracks