Tales from the Logic / Sanity border
OK, so I started with Logic 9 and I dutifully fed it many DVDs. I installed Novation's B-Station as it arrived with my soundcard. Well, I had to get a serial number from Novation and, when I did, I discovered that Logic crashes each time I use it. Scrub that and continue...
Otherwise it's been pretty stable. Only after a week of pottering have I disturbed the CPU meter, and that because I'm exploring how many insert effects I can use to make this particular guitar sound interesting. I briefly considered the option “playing it better”.
One anomaly occurred when auditioning loops. Just using the library browser and the arrow keys, I set out to listen to every drum loop, even if just for a few seconds to go “no thanks”, and I discovered a “low on memory” message. I've got 8Gb and I'm just listening to loops - one at a time. WTF??
Still in need of some decent sounds and am leaning toward Kontakt4 for a good range of everything and Zebra for an affordable but cool-sounding range of synth stuff. If cash were not an issue I'd go for the CPU-hungry (allegedly) Omnisphere. Some great sounds from that and lots of them, even before you start tweaking (which I inevitably would).
Not totally sold on the latency / thru response but this seems the way with software, even with a Mac that cost four and a half grand! The Atari ST: how did we forget how fast it was and be resolved to make it The Standard? MIDI may be a slow, serial interface but it still beats most DAW thru times for these “amazing, sample accurate softsynths”. OK, I have absolutely no proof of that so let's call it a religion and accept it anyway, eh?
It occurs to me that I should try and review as many softsynths as possible. I'm being noble, of course, the keen computer newbie heroically taking on the odds so you don't have to. And so I can collect some new sounds, of course.
