What’s new in Logic Pro for Mac 10.8
Mastering Assistant
Mastering Assistant is an effect plug-in that offers a quick and easy way to add final professional polish when you’re creating a release-ready mix. Mastering Assistant, which is available in the stereo output channel of a project, analyzes the audio and fine-tunes the sound through dynamic adjustments, frequency-balance corrections, and timbre enhancements. See Mastering Assistant.
Sample Alchemy
With the Sample Alchemy instrument plug-in, you can transform a single audio sample into a playable instrument using a variety of synthesis techniques, including granular, additive, and spectral synthesis. You can create a wide range of sounds, such as unique sound beds, pads, effects, and rhythms. See Sample Alchemy.
Beat Breaker
With the Beat Breaker multi-effect plug-in, you can radically reshape and reshuffle audio in real time, slicing audio, rearranging it, and adding scratching effects. In addition to playing back slices in a different order, you can set the speed, direction, and volume with a given number of repeats for each slice. All these slice playback features define patterns that you can change on the fly. See Beat Breaker.
Slip and Rotate tools
The Tools menu in the Tracks area and time-based editors now includes Slip and Rotate tools, which you can use to move content in audio and software instrument regions without moving the region boundaries. See Tools common to multiple working areas.
32-bit recording
You can record at 32-bit depth (floating point) with a compatible audio interface. The advantages of 32-bit recording are that you can later remove digital clipping that occurred during the recording simply by lowering the gain of the audio region, and you can increase the gain of a recording made at a low level without increasing the noise floor. See Recording settings.
New sound packs
Two new sound packs are available: the Hybrid Textures sound pack contains 70 patches as well as over 80 Apple Loops featuring Sample Alchemy. The Vox Melodics sound pack contains a diverse collection of over 475 lyrical phrases, hooks, layered harmonies, FX, and one-shots. You can download these and other sound packs using the Sound Library Manager. See Manage Logic Pro content.
Other features
Default region type: Software instrument tracks have a default region type: MIDI, Drummer, or pattern. You set the default region type when you create a track, and you can change it in the Track inspector. The default region type determines which editor—Piano Roll Editor, Drummer Editor, or Step Sequencer—opens by default when the track is selected. See Choose the default region type for a software instrument track.
Drummer and pattern regions on software instrument tracks: Drummer regions and pattern regions are now on software instrument tracks, along with MIDI regions. When you open a project in Logic Pro 10.8, Drummer tracks are converted to software instrument tracks with Drummer as the default region type. You can use Drummer regions with different drummers on the same track. Also, pattern regions are now violet in color to make it easier to distinguish them from Drummer regions.
Enhanced MIDI 2.0 support: Choose whether to display MIDI data in the List Editor and other editors using higher-resolution MIDI 2.0 percentages or decimal numbers, or using standard MIDI 1.0 values. See General View settings.
Hermode Tuning enhancements: When Hermode Tuning (HMT) is active in Tuning project settings, you can configure software instrument tracks to provide MIDI data for HMT analysis, receive tuning information, or both, by choosing the corresponding setting in the HMT pop-up menu in the Track inspector. See Edit track parameters.
Accessibility enhancements: Logic Pro features enhanced Accessibility settings, including the ability to announce the playhead position when playing, recording, and scrubbing projects. See Accessibility settings.
Spatial audio supported in the All Files Browser: The All Files Browser now supports importing bed tracks and object tracks from spatial audio projects. See Import object and bed tracks from spatial audio projects.