Since a friend gifted me with Apple Logic Pro earlier this year, I’ve created dozens of songs and released two LPs. I am hardly an expert in Logic—the software is deep—but my past experiences as a musician and analog recordist made most of Logic’s interface easy to grasp and use. If you’d done multi-track recording before the digital revolution, the mental model just worked.
Then this weekend I opened Logic hoping to start work on LP № three and found that the interface had changed. Instead of my clean, well organized wall of instruments and patches, a spaghetti wall of samples, patches, plug-ins and presets, all drunkenly jumbled together, defied me to make sense of it or even locate the instruments I rely on.
Better metaphor than spaghetti wall: If you watched Hannibal, the 2010s Mads Mikkelsen-starring American horror thriller slash love story TV series based on Thomas Harris’ collected works, you may have seen an episode involving a totem pole of human corpse parts. An aged killer, who’d been getting away with it for decades, had dug up all his victims, arranged their hacked-off heads and limbs in hideous configurations, and left his ghastly erection on a public beach to induce vomiting and tremors among would-be swimmers.
And if that’s too much for you, here’s another metaphor for what Apple has done with the new Logic Pro UI: removed all the words from a book and reinserted them in alphabetical order, so that, instead of logical narrative structures, one is simply left blinking at a chaos.
No. I’ve got it. It’s like, in place of a menu, a restaurant eats its own food, vomits it onto a table, and asks customers to pick out chunks.
You may gather that I am distressed.
I was going to make music all weekend, using a brilliantly capable digital audio workstation that had brought music composition back into my life after decades of living without it. Instead, all I could manage to do was play some chords using the default instrumental voice (a somewhat flavorless electric piano). And so, instead of soaring on the wings of melody, I crashed back to earth where I am unhappily blogging about web software.
Am I frustrated as a creative person who wanted to make music using a tool he loves and understands? Yes.
Am I disappointed and frankly baffled as a UX professional who holds certain truths to be self-evident (like don’t break the user’s mental model, and don’t foist untested changes on your customers)? Absolutely.
I thought I broke it.
Understand: Because I’ve been using the software for less than a year, and because Apple didn’t reach out to me as a customer to inform me of the huge changes they were making (let alone seek my input as a user, lol, Apple) I assumed that I had broken the interface by doing something wrong.
On Saturday I started exploring two new musical ideas and abandoned them broken and unfinished because I thought I had somehow hit the wrong button and fallen down a bottomless rabbit hole I was not ready to understand.
Then this morning, as an experiment, I opened some of my older, finished compositions and found that they, too, had a mysterious new interface that didn’t make a lick of sense … and felt like something unfortunate discovered on the bottom of a shoe.
At that point I searched for an announcement from Apple, and found their single page of Logic Pro release notes, which declared that a new AI assistant nobody asked for was now how music gets done in Logic—as opposed to, you know, selecting voices from an organized list, playing notes, marking sections, and adjusting details (i.e. as opposed to using the software as it was designed to be used).
Best of all, Apple’s release note which nobody was notified about warned me to back up my previous version of Logic Pro before updating to the new version. Except that Apple had already updated me to the new version without asking and without making a backup. Auto-updates, don’t you know.
Instead of exploring and choosing from a list, make stuff up.
The new intelligent assistant (beta)* understands requests in everyday language. The following prompts are examples of the kinds of tasks you can ask the assistant to do.
Well, at least the AI assistant nobody asked for is a Beta, which means it will be buggy and there are no guarantees. But (and it’s a big but, qualms about AI aside) the assistant isn’t the problem, since it is still apparently possible to record and edit actual musical performances even if finding the instruments is now a Sisyphean task.
The “Unified Browser” is the problem.
The new unified Browser brings the Logic Pro Sound Library, your own samples, patches, and plug-in presets together in one place, with filter tags and music understanding, built on Apple Intelligence, so you can find sounds by describing them or by how they sound.
The “Unified Browser” is Apple’s name for the wall of random corpse parts it has erected in place of neatly organized, discoverable folders of instruments, patches, and sounds.
Everything is thrown together willy-nilly, like a library’s card catalog dumped on the floor and tossed into a blender. (Yes, another metaphor. You can tell I’m upset when I jump from metaphor to metaphor like a frog from hot rock to hot rock—which is a simile.)
This means, instead of navigating easily to a flute sound you’ve saved, you have to trust that such a sound is somewhere in the corpse wall, and use AI apparently somehow (no instructions given, no clearly visible prompt entry box) to approximately describe what think you want and hope Apple Logic Pro burps up the right thing.
Coda: The Love You Make
Look, I’m not going to stop making music or throw out Logic Pro, and comments below advocating other DAWs, while welcome enough, aren’t what I’m after. I don’t want to switch to a “better” DAW. I want Logic Pro to work the way it worked last week … or at least, to offer “old style” Logic Pro UX as an option for customers who liked it just fine the way it was.
But Apple won’t do that.
And Logic Pro is not open source. Which means, a Cranky Composers League, were we to organize one, can’t fork the software to our liking.
And that is the huge difference between open source and closed software. And as a web standards person who works at an open source company, I know this. But I am also a creative who loves Apple products. And therein lies one of the contradictions of my life.
