I’m not Sascha but my biggest bugbear with Logic is the audio editing.
That's a strong portion of the things I'd like to see improved, too. Some things coming to mind (apart from the ones you've mentiuned already):
- Decent UI for the audio editing window. FFS, this looks like it looked in 1998. Amazingly enough, with the long discontinued Waveburner they already had an editor that much more deserved the name.
- *Vastly* better time stretching and pitch shifting algorithms. Didn't run any tests in quite a while (possibly not required as nothing has changed), but when I did, Logic came out extremely poor.
- Allow me to lock the horizontal zoom of the editor to the arrangement. IMO that'd be fantastic for working with multiple tracks/takes. This should be available as an option for the piano roll as well. With such a function, it'd be dead easy to line up audio and MIDI events.
Some more things:
- DON'T MESS UP GREAT FUNCTIONS! The way they have messed up various zoom functions when going from LP9 to LPX is an offense to human intelligence. The antithesis of evolution (I'll happily provide details).
- Same goes for the plugin window linking function (which they messed up in LP8 already, IIRC). Back in the days, the linking function would only work when you were actively opening a plugin window. Previously opened linked ones would then close. Now, this is still possible, but the link function is now as well tied to channel selection, so when you select another channel the plugin in the same slot would pop up automatically. Which makes sense sometimes, but very often the old behaviour would be preferable - so there should be both options.
- Fix the goddamn selected-region-to-editor-link functions. This is just not working properly anymore. Very often, when I record some MIDI data and open the editor, the content of the recorded region simply isn't shown. Requires stop/start or editor close/reopen for the content to be shown. Has never been an issue up until LPX.
- Bring back hyperdraw on regions. For those not knowing: Hyperdraw allowed MIDI CCs to be displayed straight on a region. You could then cycle between different CC numbers via an assigned keycommand. Excellent. Ever since LPX, that functionality did become a subset of the automation. Which you will now have to activate and set to region based. Automation mode is only available in its own "display mode" (which usually sucks IMO) and is as well causing some of the mentioned zoom malfunctions to be triggered. Mega-GRRRRRR!
- Give me a dedicated drum editor, FFS! No, switching to pattern mode is *not* that and Step Editor is *not* that, either. The way Cubase has that done since ages and how Logic completely fails for just as long is absolutely embarrassing.
- Allow me to load parallel inserts. I know, that's not a common DAW feature at all, but it'd be absolutely great to have. Ideally you could load as many as you'd like, but 2 would already be great for a start. Parallel processing anything without busses, summing stacks or whatever. Boom!
- Bring back the environment. Oh, I hear you, it's still there - but boy, does it suck having to deal with that abomination in 2026. They even realised that themselves, so the enviroment doesn't show up in the plain Window menu anymore unless you hold ALT while entering the menu (or assign a keycommand).
Back then, once you got the hang of it, the enviroment allowed you to do the niftiest things ever - but it's basically been for MIDI only. They could've improved that so it'd a) work with audio as well and b) be much more accessible for human beings (and not just for some alien nerds).
No idea whether anyone knows/remembers Energy XT - that's been a most excellent example of a kinda modular MIDI/audio environment.
I don't expect them to go full stop Bitwig, but some portions of that approach would open up for some great options.
- Give me a preset/library manager worth the name. The way it's done is abysmally bad. You can't move presets, can only partially delete them, can not rename them, etc. Yes, I know where they are located in Finder and have links to them in my Finder sidebar, but that's just not the same at all.
- Fix your own goddamn "Studio" instruments. To this day, apart from the upright model, I can't play any of the basses at 32 samples buffersize (at 44.1). On a MBA M3 that is. I can run the most complexed Alchemy, Kontakt, Zebra 3 and whatever patches, or even 3-4 fully loaded instances of Helix Native - but not a stinking monophonic sampled bass patch?
Fwiw, the issue with all Studio instruments is two-folded: 1) They're all EXS (now Sampler) instruments, but as the EXS is too limited in functionality, they need to combine an awful lot of instances under the hood of the front end UI - likely controlled via some kinda scripting. That seems to add quite some CPU demand. 2) At one point in time, they went for large consolidated samples (such as one long file for one articulation type) instead of individual samples. When I found out about that, I did some tests myself and the result has been that the same patches using single samples performed better compared to those using large consolidated files.
Could easily continue with quite some more things, but that should be it for now.
Very obviously, they also need to be working on proper bug fixing and adress issues *way* quicker (ARA anyone?).
