Plaidophile

I was worried that the UI was too GarageBandy, but no, it's just a lot more intuitive. When I first stepped in, things were completely foreign and alien, and poking around for just a few minutes and I've already completely relearned everything, and holy cow they have made it easy to use and yet there is more functionality and flexibility than there was before!

It's actually completely obvious how to work with buses now! Managing tracks and groups is easy! The current track's output bus shows up as a second mixer strip right in the main UI so you don't have to dink around with the Environment or set it up as a separate track! The single-pane view (which is what I was most concerned about) is actually pretty easy to work with and you can still split things up into separate windows if you need to do something more complex!

You can easily create a loop and put it into your user library! (That used to be a VERY obnoxious processs!)

They changed all the keyboard shortcuts, which threw me off at first, but the replacement shortcuts are much easier to remember anyway (like, A for automation, instead of V). Also the toolstrip is actually useful (I thought I was going to turn that off but it turns out to, you know, not suck).

Just when I was feeling down on Apple and thinking that their stuff was turning to shit (full disclosure: the main reason I upgraded to Logic 8 was because iLife'08 updated a bunch of my loops from .aif to .caf which Logic 7 doesn't understand) they have to go and come out with a totally new version of a product which is better in every way.

In my first few minutes of playing with Logic 8 I've done things that I never ever bothered to learn how to do in 6 or 7 just because they were so fiddly and weird. I don't know if this will make my music any better, but gosh darn it, it'll at least make it easier to put together.

The only thing that's tripping me up right now is the fact that right-click now brings up a context menu instead of a tool palette. It looks like now the only way to bring up the tool palette is to press Esc, but there might be an alternative too. And anyway, now the Esc palette is actually useful and stuff, so I'm sure I'll just get used to it pretty quickly. I also notice that now you can easily assign a separate tool to command-click (maybe you could before, but it was never obvious!) so that pretty much removes the need for the easy click access to the palette anyway.

GJ, Apple!