What Apple hasn’t changed is the dongle method of protecting the application from copying and theft. You need an XsKey, now a slick white USB stick with the Apple logo on one side. Installing Logic Pro doesn’t require you to plug in the XsKey, but running the application does require the USB stick to be connected to the machine where Logic Pro is installed.

With previous versions of Logic, the XsKey had its own Preference pane with a confusing array of options. That belongs to the past. The XsKey just has to be present when Logic starts up, that’s it.

Testing Logic Pro is as nice as testing a Maya Unlimited or a Photoshop, a Shake, DVD Studio Pro, or even a Final Cut Pro: it’s clear from the interface that you are dealing with a professional tool here. Logic will not limit you in any way as far as I can see. It’s being used by a good deal of famous artists. But I can’t tell you if it’s any better than DigiDesign’s products or others as I have no experience with those.

I do know, however, that it’s vastly better than TC Works’ offering, but TC Works’ sound editing application isn’t in the same market as Logic Pro; it’s simply in a different league.

From playing with it, I must admit the Environment part is still obscure to me. That’s probably because I don’t know how a sound recording studio with MIDI equipment looks like, but the way you have to set up Logic with cabling that must match your physical cabling seems like difficult to me. Still, I have heard from some people who use Logic and other tools like it that it’s not that difficult. Logic isn’t easier to set up than the others, though.

The quality of the software instruments is another area that I was particularly curious about. I’m not into electronic music, except for some rare exceptions, but I do know darn well how a cathedral organ should sound or a cello, or a classic guitar. I tried every single instrument delivered with Logic Pro, first with the default settings, and later with some fine-tuning on my side.

I was quite stunned to hear that it was really difficult to some instruments’ church organs from the real thing on CD recordings. Some instruments like cellos sounded a bit synthesized when leaving the default settings as they were. But with a bit of fine-tuning I could get better sound, less metallic in the bass areas.

The plug-ins are another feast. You can ruin your ears with some of them, as well as your equipment. But overall, they enable a creative artist to come up with endless variations, each one of them sounding slightly or totally different from the other.

The last thing that I was very interested in testing are the sound editing capabilities of Logic Pro. I wondered if it would enable a bad recording to be improved, and it turned out it did have a few plug-ins that enable recorded sounds to be improved considerably, although other applications could probably do a better job yet.

Logic Pro includes a full score editor and the ability to add notes right in there, allowing you to see exactly where the notes will appear, and more importantly, enabling you to play notes faster than you can key them in. Synchronizing sound with a QuickTime movie is possible as well. There’s a lot more to discover about Logic Pro, but as I lack the equipment and the skills to play real MIDI-instruments, these were the features that struck me as most important.

Personally I like Logic Pro a lot, but then I’m not a musician. I asked Apple Belgium to provide me with the details of a Belgian group called Hooverphonic, which I’ve been told is known on a worldwide scale. However, Apple’s PR said to have lost the group’s contact details. Hooverphonic is claimed to be using Logic for at least some of its music. Given the many creative capabilities Logic Pro supports, that wouldn’t be too surprising.

Screenshot of the main interface with a movie and an instrument [new window]