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Apple Logic Pro Review

The only digital audio workstation you need

4.5 Outstanding

By Jamie Lendino

Updated May 9, 2022

THE BOTTOM LINE

Apple Logic Pro adds integrated Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio music production in version 10.7

while retaining its core excellence. It’s a stellar update to a best-in-class DAW, and if you already

own Logic Pro, it's free.

MSRP $199.99

$199.99 at Apple.com See It

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PROS

Effective new Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio tools

Large array of bundled instruments and effects

No copy protection, unlike many competitors

Excellent value

CONS

Can't lock tempo events to SMPTE

Mixer could use larger meters and faders

 Still no fast Clip-Gain-style audio editing

APPLE LOGIC PRO SPECS

Free Version

Subscription Plan

Audio Tracks Unlimited

ALL SPECS

Apple's venerable Logic Pro has a long and storied history. Well before the

company purchased Emagic, Logic first emerged from the combination of C-

Lab's late 1980s programs Creator and Notator on the Atari ST. Today, Logic

Pro offers pro-level audio editing at a bargain price for multitrack recording,

film scoring, sound design, and post. Now with the ability to create Spatial

Audio mixes in Dolby Atmos, version 10.7 puts even more pressure on its well-established digital

audio workstation (DAW) competitors. Unless you need Avid Pro Tools for compatibility with other

studios, or you want to stick with another program simply because you're more familiar with it,

Logic Pro remains the top choice for DAWs, and it remains an Editors' Choice winner.

Price, Setup, and Installation

Apple Logic Pro is free, if you're upgrading. If you're a new customer, it still only costs a reasonable

$199.99.

To get started with Logic Pro 10.7, you need a recent Mac running macOS 11.0 or later and 6GB of

free space for the base program. To install everything, including all the packaged synths,

instruments, loops, and effects, you need to set aside 72GB. As always, Logic Pro doesn't require

hardware or software copy protection. As long as you're logged into the Apple Store with your

account, you can download, install, and run it seamlessly.

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For this updated review, I tested Logic Pro 10.7.4 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro)

running macOS Monterey 12.3.1, a second-generation Focusrite Scarlett 6i6, and a Nektar GX61

MIDI keyboard controller, and as expected, I ran into no problems. Logic Pro is now optimized for

the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors found in Apple's latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros,

as well as the M1 Ultra found in the new Mac Studio.

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If you have an older setup, the program can be set to "only load plug-ins needed for project

playback" for conserving CPU power in larger projects in a seamless fashion. In a single project,

you can run up to a whopping 1,000 stereo audio tracks, 1,000 instrument tracks, and 1,000

auxiliary tracks, and use up to 12 sends per channel strip. Apple continues to do a ton of tweaking

beneath the surface to improve system performance on lesser machines.

For version 10.7, Apple saw fit to refresh the UI again, making its usual incremental and blink-and-

you’ll-miss-it changes to the overall look. It’s all a little flatter and cleaner than before, although you

still can’t do much with the color scheme. The mixer faders and meters also remained fixed in size,

offering little of the configurability you’ll find in other DAWs such as Cubase, Digital Performer, and

Reaper.

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A Spacious Mix

The big news in version 10.7 is the introduction of Spatial Audio support with Dolby Atmos

integration. As consumers have already seen, Apple Music now plays back thousands of tracks in

these formats, and more importantly, it (along with Spotify and others) now plays music back in

lossless encoding. This finally brings the overall sound quality level of streaming services back to

the equivalent of CDs and even surpassing it in some cases.

With Logic Pro, you can now create Spatial Audio mixes and Dolby Atmos files that will play back

natively in Apple Music. The idea is that you can create mixes with elevation control, moving objects

in the soundscape around and even above you.

To get there, Apple includes a new 3D Object Panner, which you can use to position special effects

or even the occasional instrument in three-dimensional space. Logic Pro now comes with a Dolby

Atmos rendering plug-in to visualize these objects in the mix and monitor in multi-channel mode,

either using a discrete speaker system or even binaurally in standard studio headphones. Apple has

also expanded 13 of its bundled plug-ins to support these surround effects, including new spaces for

Sound Designer. Additionally, the company revamped Logic Pro’s mixer to support metering and

panning for speaker configurations up to 7.1.4.

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In March 2022, the 10.7.3 update enabled spatial audio monitoring with dynamic head tracking on

the AirPods Max, the AirPods Pro, the AirPods (3rd Generation), and the Beats Fit Pro. It also allows

you to monitor through the Apple binaural renderer, which lets you preview your mixes in spatial

audio on Apple Music. Testing these tools in depth requires many months of in-the-trenches work,

but a cursory look at the features shows that the interface is clear and plenty of fun. It's not going to

remove the need for a solid stereo mix, but it opens new vistas in the potential for creative ways to

pan sounds. And having all this integrated within Logic Pro levels gives any engineer the ability to

create these mixes at no extra cost.

The Producer Big Leagues

Apple has also added plenty of content to Logic Pro with version 10.7. The app now comes with the

eight Producer Packs originally introduced in GarageBand. These include royalty-free sounds from

famous producers such as Take a Daytrip, Mark Ronson, and Oak Felder, plus slap house and

modern ambient sound packs among other sounds—2,800 loops, 50 kits, and 120 instrument

patches in all. They sound suitably warm, fat, and immediately usable. Having new material in

successive versions is always welcome, as you can never have enough sounds to inspire you.

Logic also now includes the original multitrack project of Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your

Name)”—two of them, in fact. One is the standard multitrack project and the other is a Dolby Atmos

Spatial Audio mix, which is useful for seeing what the new tools change and add. The 140-track

sessions are a great inclusion just for their educational value, as the song is one of the best-

produced and best-sounding songs of the year, with its flamenco-tinged trap beats, sophisticated

harmonies, insanely catchy hooks, and serpentine bass lines. Seeing how it was mixed is a survey

course in engineering all its own. Apple also includes the full multi-track session for Billie Eilish’s

2015 breakout hit “Ocean Eyes,” complete with all the stock plug-ins and settings her and her

brother/producer Finneas O’Connell used to make the song. 

Version 10.5's Sampler was a ground-up, long-overdue reworking of Logic’s EXS24 workhorse

sampling plug-in. Sampler now provides the core workstation-style sample set, including pianos,

guitars, and other instruments, giving Logic a native plug-in that competes with Kontakt 6 and

Halion 5 while remaining fully backward-compatible with EXS24 libraries. Sampler gives you a

single window to create and edit sampler instruments in the zone waveform editor, run them

through a filter section, and map the samples to different keys and dynamics levels. More

importantly, you can drag and drop to it, and it supports Flex Time to preserve sample lengths

regardless of pitch. 

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The much smaller Quick Sampler lets you drop in single samples and immediately turn them into

playable instruments from a file on your desktop, a voice memo, or another piece of audio from

within Logic Pro. You can also record directly into it with a microphone, and of course, you can slice

it up if you need to (the sample, not the microphone). This is another piece lifted from Ableton Live—

in this case, that DAW’s Simpler plug-in. Apple also migrated Auto Sampler over from MainStage. It

helps you automatically create a sampler instrument from a piece of hardware such as an external

synthesizer.

My favorite Logic Pro instrument remains Alchemy, a full-blown additive, spectral, and granular

synthesizer originally from Camel Audio that competes well with the $500 Spectrasonics

Omnisphere 2. Plenty of other excellent instruments remain in the bin as well. Overall, Logic Pro

now comes with 5,900 instrument and effect patches, 1,200 sampled instruments, and 14,750

loops.
It's Live—No, Really

Back in version 10.5, Apple responded to Ableton Live's growing influence with its own Live Loops

view. Live Loops consists of columns of “cells” for composing and arranging music in real time. In

this view, you can drag loops, samples, or recorded audio into the grid, and then trigger the cells in

different combinations in a non-linear fashion to experiment with ideas. Unlike in the Tracks view,

the Live Loops view doesn't force you to cut and paste regions into different tracks first or even to

loop sections of the song.

Once you find groups of cells playing together that you like, you can arrange them in song sections

called scenes—still without worrying about how long anything will play. Right-click a scene and you

can change how it’s queued up or what note or beat it drops in on (via Quantize Start), and it offers

duplicate, insert, and set-scene-trigger options. You can perform with it on stage, as it’s equally

adept live as in the studio (hence its name). This new workflow gets at the heart of what Ableton

Live’s Session view offers, except that you can still transition to Logic’s existing Tracks view

afterward with all your newly composed regions intact. Additionally, you can see the Tracks and

Live Loops views simultaneously and go back and forth between them while working. 

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An easy way to get started with Live Loops is to dial up one of the 17 pre-loaded scenes, which are

available as templates when you first make a new project. Experiment with those or delete the cells

to create your own with the suggested instruments.

The Remix FX plug-in lets you perform transitions, stutter edits, gates, virtual record scratching, and

other little production tricks that you can control with the mouse or via Logic Remote on an iPad or

iPhone. Nifty flare-style effects follow the mouse cursor (or your finger) as you open and close the
filters or trigger stutters using the customizable pads. It’s beautifully animated and had zero lag in

my tests. You can strap this one across the mix bus or on individual tracks. With Logic Remote,

tilting the iPad or iPhone up and down lets you tweak the filters as you play. Remix FX debuted in

GarageBand, but it clearly belongs here and it’s a ton of fun. 

Apple's clever Step Sequencer evokes old drum machines and synths, but with an attractive, FL

Studio-style interface with 150 built-in rhythm and melody patterns. It’s great for building beats—

not just drums, but bass and melodic parts with multiple variations and even controller data

automation. Like Live Loops and the Tracks view, the new Step Sequencer pulls someone like me out

of the piano roll and score views I’ve been using for 30 years and into something fresh, even if I still

prefer to play a MIDI keyboard when composing.

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Mixing and Effects

The main mix console offers faders, pan, and other track controls, and as many inserts and sends

as you need. There are 256 buses available, along with a true stereo panning option that lets you

adjust the individual left and right levels instead of just attenuating either left or right signal. The

mixer’s 64-bit summing engine sounds excellent, and there are welcome analog-style VCA faders

available as well.

One sticking point in Logic remains the on-screen faders and metering. You can switch between

pre- and post-fader, and toggle different panning laws. Apple greatly smoothed out their responses

in the past couple of point updates. You get plenty of options for tuning their scale and release times,

too. But on a purely visual level, the meters and channel strips themselves are still considerably
smaller than what you get in Pro Tools, Steinberg Cubase, and other DAWs. Larger ones are

available in Logic Remote, but then you can only see eight at once.

More flexible channel-strip sizing and placement would also be welcome. Another quirk: In order to

rearrange auxiliary buses, you have to enable automation to create lanes for them in the Track view

and then move them around there, which is clumsy and clutters up the UI. 

Some plug-in effects highlights: ChromaVerb delivers algorithmic reverb programs along with a

colorful visual component, letting you see and shape the reverb tail. It offers lots of sweet-sounding

patches, including Collins Gate (they're playing my '80s song!) and a slew of useful vocal reverbs

and ambiances for different tracking situations. It’s a good complement to Space Designer, Logic’s

long-running convolution reverb. The vastly improved DeEsser 2 helps minimize sibilance on vocal

tracks. I’ve spent hours and hours trying (with mixed success) to get good results out of the original

DeEsser. After testing, I'm pleased to report the new one is a significant step up in sound quality and

is much more forgiving when you work with it. 

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My favorite effects plug-in remains Logic's main Compressor, with its VCA (transparent solid state),

FET, and Opto (tube-like) modes that behave differently and provide exactly the kind of warmth and

crunch you'd expect from actual vintage hardware. There's a gorgeous paneled interface for each

of the modes, including a dBx 160 emulation called Classic VCA and an SSL bus compressor

emulation labeled Vintage VCA, although Wave's own SSL bus compressor emulation sounds better

in back-to-back comparison tests, at least on vocals. Still, I can always get good results with Logic's

compressor one way or another.

In all, there are more than 5,500 presets across the various 103 bundled plug-ins, plus 660

sampled convolution reverb spaces in Space Designer. The Tube EQ added back in 10.4 has also

proven useful, with its Neve, API, and Pultec models. It's tough to imagine a mixing situation these

tools can't cover. And although you can also master in the box and I have done so for many clients,

also have a look at the excellent Izotope Ozone Advanced for more dynamic EQ and additional tools,

or even the ultra-high-end Magix Sequoia if your needs include four-point audio editing.

Audio Editing and Some Issues

Logic Pro’s audio editing tools remain comprehensive if not top of the class. Fades are generated in

real time rather than stored as separate audio files. You can apply fades to multiple regions

simultaneously, which helps tremendously in sound design and other post-production tasks. As

before, you can write automation to regions, which makes it much simpler to move around and

arrange your project without destroying recorded fader and knob movements. There are Relative

and Trim modes for adjusting existing automation data, which you can use to ride a fader and

smooth out an edit. Region Gain is somewhat similar to Clip Gain, one of my favorite features in Pro

Tools. It makes it easy to quickly adjust a region that for whatever reason is recorded at a different

level, without having to resort to inserting a plug-in or a destructive edit. It requires a few more

clicks than Pro Tools does, though, and you really feel it when doing several hours of edits on a lead

vocal.

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Flex Pitch and Flex Time make quick work of tuning vocals and fixing mistakes in recorded audio

tracks. Flex Pitch in particular remains a great freebie if you're used to working with an entirely

separate app (such as Melodyne). I've used it extensively at this point. With careful edits, I find it to

be as transparent as you could possibly want, and I love not having to export and re-import tuned

vocals each time.

As with any application so large and enduring, Logic has some quirks that have yet to be remedied.

Anyone working in commercial music, particularly in scoring for episodic television or film, may

have come across how you can't lock tempo events to SMPTE timecode. (SMPTE refers to the

Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and SMPTE timecode is a widely used standard

for labeling individual frames of film or video on a timeline.) Even if you use separate Logic sessions

for each cue, each could require multiple tempos—and if you're using Beat Mapping and need to

adjust one section's tempo to accommodate a director's change, and that section comes before an

event that's fixed to a frame, it can throw the entire cue off. Although you can technically lock the

music to a frame by SMPTE-locking the regions, the cue will no longer have any relation to the

metronome, and all the other sections you're not working on will move from their initial positions.

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Some other fiddly bits in the day-to-day workflow remain. For example, you still can’t change the

default folders for your projects and bounces, which is problematic on Macs with small internal

SSDs. If you use a lot of instrument patches, you’ll end up with a cluttered project with extraneous

aux buses. Logic combines reverb buses when possible, but you still end up with 10 or more in every

new project pretty easily. Clicking on Enable Patch Merging and disabling Sends stops this behavior,

but you have to do that for every single project. New software instrument tracks always start with

Classic Electric Piano unless you uncheck the Open Library box, and inexplicably, you can’t change

the electric piano default to something else.

Still the Logical Choice

There are hundreds of other excellent features I can't discuss here, many of which have been with

the program for years. With the latest update, and despite the issues I've already described, Apple
keeps Logic Pro at the forefront of the DAW market. Any quibbles with the program—and some are

to be expected, given its sheer breadth and depth—pale in comparison with its virtues. For $199.99,

Logic Pro turns your Mac into a music studio that was simply impossible on this scale even just 10

years ago, let alone that it’s the same software pros use on a regular basis. 

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The competition is well established and fierce, but much of it costs more. Avid Pro Tools, MOTU

Digital Performer, and Cubase—what used to be considered the other three major established

DAWs years ago that are still around today—remain hundreds of dollars more expensive and

usually require either hardware copy protection, subscription fees for support, or some

combination of those added costs. Perhaps the most compelling higher-end DAW is Ableton Live,

which commands a rabid following for its unique composition and live performance-oriented UI.

Once Logic added Live Loops, Ableton Live gained a new, fierce enemy. No fan of Live’s deep Max

MSP and modular synth plug-ins will find what they want in Logic, but new producers with their eye

on an Ableton Push 2 may find joy in Logic Pro and Logic Remote instead. On the lower end, Logic

also sees competition from PreSonus Studio One, the utilitarian-but-bargain-priced Cockos Reaper,

and long-standing electronic-dance-music favorites FL Studio and Reason. 

At this point, Logic Pro has serious celebrity cred; Daniel Pemberton, the composer for Black

Mirror , used the program to score Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Dark Crystal: Age of

Resistance , while the aforementioned top producers are on record as using Logic Pro as well. Many

commercial studios in the US remain committed to Avid's Pro Tools. But it's getting tougher to

justify the costs of Pro Tools, given how capable Logic Pro has become, especially when coupled

with high-end Apogee or Universal Audio hardware.

 ADVERTISEMENT

Logic Pro is a stellar recording, editing, mixing, and post-production environment. If you have a Mac

and haven't decided on a proper songwriting, recording, or mixing program yet, or if you're aching

to upgrade from an earlier version of Logic or even GarageBand (project files from which still open

seamlessly in Logic), Logic Pro is your best bet. It's an Editors' Choice winner for DAWs. That said,

Pro Tools is another Editors' Choice winner because it's an excellent if expensive tool. If you're

already invested in Pro Tools, you may well want to stick with it. If you're committed to working on a

PC, it's the clear winner, as Logic Pro is only available on Macs. GarageBand also wins top honors

because it's stunningly powerful for a free app that comes with every new Mac.

Apple Logic Pro

4.5 EDITORS' CHOICE

See It

$199.99 at Apple.com

MSRP $199.99

PROS

Effective new Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio tools

Large array of bundled instruments and effects

No copy protection, unlike many competitors

View More

CONS

Can't lock tempo events to SMPTE

 Mixer could use larger meters and faders

Still no fast Clip-Gain-style audio editing

THE BOTTOM LINE

Apple Logic Pro adds integrated Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio music production in version

10.7 while retaining its core excellence. It’s a stellar update to a best-in-class DAW, and if you

already own Logic Pro, it's free.

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DIG DEEPER WITH R E L AT E D STO R I E S

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(DAWs) for 2023 Content Creators

BY JAMIE LENDINO BY GABRIEL ZAMORA

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BY CHLOE ALBANESIUS BY TYLER HAYES

About Jamie Lendino

Editor-In-Chief, ExtremeTech

I’ve been writing and reviewing technology for PCMag and other Ziff Davis publications since 2005,

and I’ve been full-time on staff since 2011. I've been the editor-in-chief of ExtremeTech since early

2015, except for a recent stint as executive editor of features for PCMag, and I write for both sites.

I’ve been on CNBC and NPR's All Things Considered talking tech, plus dozens of radio stations

around the country. I’ve also written for two dozen other publications, including Popular

Science , Consumer Reports , Computer Power User , PC Today , Electronic Musician , Sound and

Vision , and CNET. Plus, I've written five books about retro gaming and computing:

Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming

Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games

Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation

Faster Than Light: The Atari ST and the 16-Bit Revolution

Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987-1994

Before all this, I was in IT supporting Windows NT on Wall Street in the late 1990s. I realized I’d

much rather play with technology and write about it, than support it 24/7 and be blamed for

everything that went wrong. I grew up playing and recording music on keyboards and the Atari ST,

and I never really stopped. For a while, I produced sound effects and music for video games (mostly

mobile games in the 2000s). I still mix and master music for various independent artists, many of

whom are friends.

Read Jamie's full bio

Read the latest from Jamie Lendino

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