Plaidophile

Okay, I know I have said this before but Logic 8 (aka Logic Studio) is a very very worthwhile upgrade. Take comping alone justifies the upgrade cost. In Logic 7 and earlier, managing multiple vocal or instrument takes was a huge pain in the ass since you had to create a bunch of virtual channels and manually splice between them and mute/unmute regions and stuff and then set up your crossfades by hand and it got me into a bad habit of just trying to get a single perfect take for everything (which is impossible).

But with comping, you can just rerecord parts that need work, and then your master region gets a little 'expand' widget on it, and when you expand things the individual recordings which make up a comp appear and you can very very easily just select the parts of which takes you want to use in the master comp, and it handles the crossfading for you, and you can also tweak the individual recordings through the sample editor and so on. It is so very very nice and it has completely saved my sanity while working on this album.

(Oh yeah I am working on an album.)

Oh and the new mixer makes it very easy to keep track of buses and so on, although the UI for actually setting up your buses is still the same old crappy pile of weird. It'd be nice if there were a way to just select a group of tracks and then with a couple of clicks instantly reroute them through a bus. It'd also be nice if buses could be configured specifically to act as a through instead of a send; even if all of the tracks are using a bus as a through, every plugin you put on it always defaults to acting like a send. Which is very annoying.

Also I still dislike how automation vs. arrangement are two different modes in the same UI. And automation management could still use a bit of work. But it's a very tricky problem to begin with that doesn't have any single Right Way To Do Things so I tolerate it.