Apple buys emagic!

I was totally at a loss when I read this - and sent the following straight to info@emagic.de (based on advice from the uk distributor)



"To whom it may concern,



I just wanted to write and express my concerns over the recent announcements

made regarding the take-over of Emagic by Apple Corp. One statement made in

the recent press release concerned me greatly and prompted this letter.



"Macintosh®-based products account for over 65 percent of Emagic's current

revenues. Emagic's Windows-based product offerings will be discontinued on

September 30, 2002."



I have recently spent over six thousand pounds (6000GBP) to get a home

studio up & running in order to help myself and other local artists, who

cannot afford "professional" studiotime, to produce high quality mp3 tracks

and CD demo disks suitable for the media and music industries.



I based the studio around a Dell Pentium 4 and Logic Gold 4.8 with a view to

upgrade to Platinum and Logic Control when the revenues allowed. I used a PC

as I have had more experience with them and find them cheaper to run and

parts more readily available for expansion. I used Emagic Logic because I

believed it was the best software available, with a superior interface and

functionality to its competitors. The fact that it is supported by PC & Mac

platoforms meant that I could be versatile in my approach to work and if my

clients wished to take their work to other studios then more than likely

they would find Logic there too.



Now to be told that in 12 weeks my software will be obsolete and I will no

longer be in receipt of the benefits of future upgrades has left me at a

loss. I appreciate that for many of you (the emagic staff) this came as a

total surprise but I would like to know what I can do to persuade you that

the PC market is just as important and vibrant as the Mac market and that

loosing a third of your client base is verging on the bounds of stupidity?



I have had several Mac users say to me that they cannot understand the

decision and judging by the response from the large user community there is

in the Yahoo Logic group that I frequent, I think this is a view shared by

many. Several people have already said that they will trade up to Cubase SX.

Will Apple offer discounted machines in order to help us "trade-up" to the

world of Mac? Please can we have some response to the news as soon as

possible?



I hope that you will pass my comments on to those concerned and please do

check the feedback in http://groups.yahoo.com/group/logic-users/.



Regards



Andy Dempster"

:eek: they trash 35 percent of their users!! this is rediculous!! I think this is just some sort of teaser..



"I think this is just a "logic"al evolution of things,captain"



Greetings,



huby

I am certainly not happy about Emagic's take-over by Apple. Although I am not a business person, it does seem like a poor business decision to totally discontinue support and development for the Windows based Logic side of things.



For now, I'll just keep on using my LAWP 5.1 program (and I guess there will be a 5.2 update in August, 2002). I've spent way too much time, energy and money getting my computer-based recording system optimized and running reliably (most of the time). My computer has a few good years left on it. I plan on adding more memory and a third hard drive and maybe even a second processor, but that's about it. The Windows Logic software is a great program . . . at least it meets my needs.



Where will I go next when my current system bites the dust??? Who knows where the computer-based recording systems will be in a few years!? I guess I'll just cross that bridge when I come to it.



I do feel betrayed, though. If not by Emagic, then by the whole computer/software business. Definately, after September 30, 2002, Apple will not be supporting my current LAWP-based needs. Too bad for me. . . too bad for them.



Ted Fiebke, RN

TOO LIVE NURSE

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://toolivenurse…"]TOO LIVE NURSE[/]="http://toolivenurse…"]TOO LIVE NURSE[/]

Hi folks. This is what my own topic on the Mac Forum a few Forums above this one is about.



"Emagic Logic:PC Owners Get Shafted!"



I'm a Mac User also, and yes, hopefully the result will be a kick butt option....maybe.



In the meantime, as I said on my post, I think this is very RUDE :(



I also don't think this is a topic that should be restricted to one Forum only. Here's a link some of you may be interested in checking out on George Massenburgs Forum. There IS some interesting comment about EMagic not being able to prevent code cracking....see what you think.



(Dead Link Removed)

I agree, this has really left a lot of people in a bad way. But then, you must realize that this is a high tech industry. Today's state-of-the-art is tomorrow's dinosaur.

Look at Avid/ProTools/Digidesign. They're notorious for introducing new products and leaving owners of their previous products out in the cold. And that's their OWN customers!

Soundscape owners got lucky. When Mackie bought-out Soundscape, everything went full speed ahead.

"The nature of the Beast" in high tech electronics is that it is very fast-paced and unpredictable. Unfortunately, in this situation, Logic PC bites the dust. However, keep in mind that if you already have it, you can continue to use it for as long as you want. You just won't have any more updates. It will be interesting to see if Apple will make any special offers to Logic PC owners.

On the positive side, in the future, this could really benefit the DAW community, in general. Here's a couple of pastes from the RO Mac forum...

Opus posted:

"Apple has the OMS dude...Apple has Emagic(the best MIDI sequencer software out there...)together with that combination they will make a serious battle with Nuendo"

I posted:

"Hmmm ... funny you brought-up Nuendo, Bro. I was thinking along the same lines.

It sucks that they're dropping the PC side, but I think this is an overall good, strong move for Apple, provided that they follow through. There is tremendous potential in creating a complete audio system from the ground, up, directly from the computer manufacturer. Can you say, "COMPATIBILITY"? I imagine it will come at a very dear price, though.

Indeed, this could very well escalate into a host-based war. With PCs' front side buses climbing rapidly, Apple is going to have a rough time getting the performance out of their systems to meet a PC's sheer power for running audio. With the advancement of computing technology, the time for host based systems to come into the limelight is just around the corner. I think that Apple has picked a very opportune time to make their move."

Bottom Line:

If Apple pours a lot of R&D into this new venture, they may be a serious competitor to Nuendo in the "coming of age" status of host-based digital recording in the near future. And we all know that competition will force all parties envolved to continue to "push the envelope" that much harder.

This whole thing is sooo stupid. I'm p****d off!

Goodbye Logic...



Best regards,

Fredrik Lidin

Have you guys seen Cakewalk is offering a cross grade for Logic PC users for 199 to go to Sonar!!!

Our engineer at work called that a cross dressing! :p

If you use Logic the LAST program you want to go to is Sonar! I'm teching a Via based AMD system here right now and with Sonar...Ewwwwwwwwww :eek:

what a joke! I'd be pissed off if I had bought that program...

Anyhue...Cakewalk...what a joke

Opus

Opus...

Why is Sonar 2.0 XL such a bad choice? I haven't tried it, but I'm certainly looking that way since this thing happened.

Do you think it's better with Cubase SX?

I thought Cubase VST was kind of a joke...

...well, funny anyway :)



Regards,

Fredrik Lidin

Opus sure does seem to have it bad for CakeWalk. Personally I switched from Sonar to Logic, and I like Logic alot better. Now that I know what it is I am wanting to do, I am trying to figure out how to do it in sonar.

One thing that I found, that I don't like, is that you can't arm/disarm a track for recording, while the audio engine is running.

Just like alot of folks, I find it easy to get my ideas out buy laying the foundation for a tune first(say a drum beat, or a bass groove). Loop it, then move on to the next track to add a new part, and on and on, until you pretty much got what you want. In Sonar, you'll have to stop after each part to arm the next track.

Opus has mentioned a few draw backs of Sonar somewhere on another post, not extremely accurate, but he had some good points. if you are running a studio, you have clients, then maybe Opus is right, and Cakewalk sucks? But if you are using the program to creat music(say you are a Songwriter) then Sonar does that just fine. (an inside source told me they were going to be fixing that loop thing shortly)

I got this off another forum, It is kinda long, but I couldn't repeat it all myself.

As the main technical guy here at Cakewalk, I find it distressing that SONAR barely enters the conversation when disappointed Logic users discuss switching to another application. In the 8 years I’ve been at Cakewalk, we’ve always kept a close eye on the competition, especially Logic. When SONAR shipped last year, the 20 or so members of the SONAR development team felt that on a functional and performance level, SONAR had at last pulled ahead.



So I am guessing that the main reason why you folks aren’t considering SONAR is due to a lack of awareness of how powerful it has become. Without sounding too much like a sales pitch, here are some reasons why.



First, SONAR has the best VST/VSTi integration on the market. How can I make a claim like that, when everyone knows we don’t support VST??? Of course we support VST, it’s just that we didn’t implement the actual code to do so!



Consider these facts. The current breed of VST “wrappers” have 2+ man-years of effort already invested in them. They make VSTplug-insappear within SONAR as if they were native DirectX. You literally don't know that the plug-in has been wrapped. And the runtime overhead of the wrappers is nil.



If we were to support VST "natively", we would essentially be duplicating the work of the wrappers, since our audio engine is fully built on DirectX. And the existing wrappers are so seamless and slick already that we couldn't add any value to the equation. (And by the way, the cost of SONAR plus a VST/DirectX wrapper is still less than Cubase SX.)



So assume you’re with me so far, that we do indeed support VST. How can I claim that our support is the best? Mainly because of the SONAR audio engine, which is way ahead of Cubase in performance and capability. In particular:



- SONAR places absolutely no limit (other than your CPU) on how manyplug-insyou can use. Cubase, on the other hand, limits you to 8 effects per channel, and a maximum of 32 virtual instruments.



- SONAR has up to 16 aux sends and up to 64 virtual mains. Each virtual main can be routed to an audio driver output, and multiple drivers can be utilized simultaneously. Each aux and virtual main can have any number of effects patched in.



- SONAR has automatic delay compensation for all channels, inserts and mains. Even for synths. Even for multi-out synths. This capability is due to DirectX, which takes an “object oriented” approach to streaming and allows for delay compensation within each plug-in.



- SONAR has 5 distinct levels of gain staging for every audio clip in a track: (1) per-clip pre-effect fade-in/fade-out edge; (2) per-clip pre-effect volume and pan envelope; (3) per-track post-effect volume and pan envelope; (4) per-track post-effect volume and pan offset; (5) per-track pre-effect level trim. And if that isn’t enough, you can bus a track to its own virtual main and get another level of gain control on the virtual main.



Some people claim that SONAR’s audio engine is lacking because we support WDM instead of ASIO. Again, I think there is some misunderstanding here. WDM vs. ASIO is not an either/or thing.



On Win2k and WinXP, ASIO is software layer on top of WDM. Whenever a hardware vendor needs to develop a Win2k or WinXP audio driver, they must first develop a kernel mode component for their driver. This kernel mode component runs at the highest privilege level in the operating system, and has intimate knowledge with the hardware capabilities. All kernel mode audio components are WDM. It is unavoidable; thanks to the way Microsoft designed the Windows audio architecture and driver development kit.



So what this means is if you are running on Win2k or WinXP, you almost certainly already have a WDM driver. And this WDM driver is in fact the same exact code that the ASIO driver utilizes.



There’s more cool stuff to talk about IMO, but I don’t want to run on for too long. If there’s anything specific you want to know about SONAR, I’ll keep lurking and answer as best I can.



Thanks for listening. Let the flames begin!

I've been using Sonar because my card only supports WDM for the moment. I use it as a composing scratch pad.

There's no doubt how strong and efficient the Sonar engine is. They just need to bring the program features to a more pro level.

If they were listening to what people want instead of exaulting praises on the superiority of their product, they might have the attention of more serious users than myself. :cool:



Edit: Not to turn this into an Apple bashing thread, but their heavy handed abuse of users is what made me leave their camp in the first place. I still like the GUI though....

I've been a Cakewalk user for almost ten years. I upgraded to Sonar last year. Once they ironed out the initial bugs, it has worked very well. I just did a session yesterday and one of the musicians smirked at my setup, but can't deny that it worked flawlessly and sounds great.

To each, his own is what they say. :roll: