Logic Pro 13 adds touch controls and a subscription AI assistant
Logic Pro 13 leans on two technologies, touch and an assistant, and they do not land equally. According to a hands-on review, touch is mature, while the beta assistant gets in the way more than it helps.
Who pays for what
Logic Pro 13 is a free upgrade for download purchasers. It is available on its own or inside the Apple Creator Studio subscription. The chat assistant needs a subscription because it relies on Gemini. Natural-language search in the Unified Browser, Find Similar and stem separation work without one.
Touch gestures and Sidecar
Touch is vastly expanded. Gestures include one-finger scrolling, touch and hold to drag, and touch and hold for contextual menus. Several Mixer faders can move at once with Multi-Touch, and several fingers can edit the Step Sequencer together. Multi-Touch also reaches Sample Alchemy, Remix FX, Channel EQ and Smart Controls.
Logic now works with Sidecar. A plug-in window moved to an iPad resizes to fit the screen, third-party plug-ins included. Owners of the new touchscreen MacBook Pro can touch the display directly.
The Play Surface adds a piano layout and a drum grid with a repeat mode. It effectively replaces Musical Typing and takes over its cmd-K shortcut, though Musical Typing is still there. The reviewer wants a latch function for the repeat mode and a more accessible arpeggiator, and calls the surface a first step.
Liquid Glass, browser and drum stems
The version number suggests more than the release delivers. Logic adopts Apple's Liquid Glass styling, which adds translucency to menus and adjusts windows and toolbar buttons. The theme is dark like Final Cut Pro's, only darker. It stays dark when the system switches to a light theme, and the shade cannot be changed.
The Unified Browser is more streamlined. Find Similar locates sounds from your own audio samples, as in Ableton Live. A machine-learning search lets you describe a sound in plain language. The reviewer found the results hit-or-miss, and a conventional search remains available.
Drum parts can now be isolated, replaced or rebalanced, and Sergio George contributes a salsa Producer Pack. Fixes concentrate on the Step Sequencer, Takes and comping and Sample Alchemy. Among them are fixes to some of the video functionality, and undo history is now on by default.
The assistant in practice
The chat window answers questions in place of the documentation and takes prompts for tracks, mixing, regions and editing. It is powered in part by Gemini. Apple labels it a beta, asks for feedback and calls it the intelligent assistant in lowercase. The reviewer reads that as uncertainty.
Help queries return a large block of manual text with no images and no links to other sections. Typing the same words into Help gave more choices and near-instant results, while the assistant made the reviewer wait.
Editing prompts such as adding parts or creating a Track Stack can be done, but the interface already does those. By the time the reviewer had worked out the prompt and waited, the process generally ended up slower and more confusing. Requests to remove silences or slice audio sent the reviewer back to the help.
A stem tempo-match returned tempo changes every couple of beats. A lo-fi project request produced a piano and glitchy effects and slowed the tempo, after a long wait. Before using the feature, you click through warnings that ask for your age and explain what happens when AI tokens run out.
Without the assistant, the reviewer calls this a worthy but generally minor update.
Source: CDM Create Digital Music