Okay, so the new version of Logic, Apple’s flagship $999 music recording package, shipped recently. It’s a little odd that it shipped so quickly after NAMM, since Apple was showing a pre-release version at that show. Kinda makes one wonder about how much testing it received, no?
The most significant thing about this release is that it runs as a Universal Binary, of course. Since we (Audio Damage) sell AudioUnit products, we duitifully set about updating our stuff to be Universal Binary. The developer release notes for Logic indicated that there have been changes–yet again–to the manner in which Logic hosts AudioUnits.
We used a work-in-progress, BigSeq (now available as previously mentioned here), as our first Universal Binary product. Everything went reasonably smoothly, all things considered, and BigSeq is enjoying a warm reception by the plug-in using world. However, just after releasing it we discovered some previously unnoticed problems with how it handles automation data in Logic. This wasn’t a huge surprise since this has been a tricky area for AUs in the past.
So, we started investigating, and found somewhat baffling behavior. To make a long story short, after about two days of head-scratching and study of both our code and the so-called documentation for AudioUnit developers (including the release notes for Logic 7.2), we arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Logic 7.2 itself is broken. Using only Apple’s AUs we are able to consistently reproduce completely erroneous behavior. Automation appears to work at first, but it is easy to bring about a situation in which all automation data ceases to have any effect on the AU.
So, long story short: Apple’s $999 product is broken, not our $39 product.
That’s two days of work spent chasing a wild goose, rather than doing something that actually serves the needs of our customers.
Thanks, Apple. But hey, this new iMac is pretty nice.
