Apple Logic 10.5

Apple’s venerable DAW takes the fight to Ableton Live, with a couple of familiar additions, but can it compete?

The arrival of Logic Pro X 10.5 – which Apple calls the “biggest update to Logic since the launch of Logic Pro X” – has no doubt come as a welcome distraction for Mac-based musicians.

And there’s certainly plenty of enticing new stuff in Logic Pro X 10.5 (free for existing users) to get excited about, as the fruity tech leviathan makes obvious but positive moves towards bringing its blockbuster DAW in line with more, shall we say, progressive contemporaries such as Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio, FL Studio, and even Native Instruments’ Maschine.

To that end, the most architecturally seismic new feature is the not wholly unexpected introduction of the Live Loops system, as already established in the iOS version of Logic’s junior sibling, GarageBand.

This brings Live/Bitwig-style non-linear ’cell-based’ loop recording and playback into the picture, ideal for compositional and experimental use in the studio, and live performance shenanigans onstage.

Then there’s the new Step Sequencer, which facilitates programming of beats and melodic lines in an interface “inspired by classic drum machine workflows”; Drum Synth, which is a very similar proposition to the Maschine 2 module of the same self-explanatory name; the redesigned Drum Machine Designer; and a complete rebuilding of the venerable EXS24 sampler as two new sample playback devices – Sampler and Simpl… er, sorry, Quick Sampler.