[flats]

What leads you to believe that Logic has been shedding users? What little information I can find on this suggests that Logic has in fact been growing slightly & has significant market share. I also think it’s a huge driver of Mac sales.

[robenkleene]

Yeah, this is mainly based on Ableton Live clearly eating everyone's lunch on the electronic music front, and myself following Logic's new features added over the last five to ten years (e.g., combination of copying Live-style looping/sampling features, and the ML session player stuff). Just from my observation these new features have been hitting very lukewarm with their audience. Logic (and Cubase) seem stuck between Pro Tools for live music recording and arranging, and Live for electronic music. The one area Logic still seems super strong to me is composing and arranging sample-based instruments, e.g., like you might do for a soundtrack. But that just seems like a small market.

Curious if you have any counter information here? There's definitely a ton of room for me to be wrong on this.

[flats]

I think we both have a lot of room for being wrong! There seem to be no reliable sources for DAW market share, and I imagine all of these companies consider it in their interests to keep the number of active users of their software to themselves. So anything I have to say here is purely anecdotal.

From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.

In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).

What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.

[robenkleene]

Thanks for sharing your perspective!

> What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

This is purely just from reading opinions of folks online, they seem to think Live has advantages for being more tailored for electronic music, and Logic is more dated, and some of the more entry-level features (e.g., ML session players) rub people the wrong way.

Also awesome to hear the love for Cycling 74! Max is perhaps my personal favorite piece of software ever, and that same group I follow I mainly see actually complaining about it in Live! I maintain a couple of Max for Live plugins:

https://github.com/robenkleene/sidewinder

https://github.com/robenkleene/thwomp

[dagmx]

Ableton is king for electronic music, but isn’t a very strong DAW for general audio work outside of that.

there’s a lot of genres out there and Logic is still considered one of the best for general DAWs out there.

[flats]

Feel you on the entry-level features making people worried that Apple is prosumer-izing their baby. I worry about that sometimes.

Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.

I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.

What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…

[coldtea]

>Logic (and Cubase) seem stuck between Pro Tools for live music recording and arranging, and Live for electronic music

Which is the best place to be to do both - which is what a huge number of musicians need - not just (or ever) recording 16 channel drums and 10 musicians in some big studio like with Pro Tools, nor doing just EDM and working off just a laptop (as with Ableton).

High end studios will use Pro Tools for legacy reasons. EDM and electronica musicians will usually opt for Ableton (and many for FL too, hugely popular as well).

But the 10s of millions of people recording and producing music however, will either be fully electronic and opt for something like Live, or will be (even more common) in the place you descrive Logic and Cubase being stuck in (Studio Pro and Reaper too).

That's "stuck place" between the two case is a much bigger market. The Pro Tools market is tiny in comparison. Which is perhaps also why the go from bankcruptcy to bankcruptcy.