Can you run Logic Pro on MacBook Pro?

Price, Setup, and Installation

Apple Logic Pro is free, if you're upgrading. If you're a new customer, it still only costs a reasonable $199.99.

To get started with Logic Pro 10.7, you need a recent Mac running macOS 11.0 or later and 6GB of free space for the base program. To install everything, including all the packaged synths, instruments, loops, and effects, you need to set aside 72GB. As always, Logic Pro doesn't require hardware or software copy protection. As long as you're logged into the Apple Store with your account, you can download, install, and run it seamlessly.

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For this updated review, I tested Logic Pro 10.7.4 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro) running macOS Monterey 12.3.1, a second-generation Focusrite Scarlett 6i6, and a Nektar GX61 MIDI keyboard controller, and as expected, I ran into no problems. Logic Pro is now optimized for the new M1 Pro and M1 Max processors found in Apple's latest 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros, as well as the M1 Ultra found in the new Mac Studio.

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If you have an older setup, the program can be set to "only load plug-ins needed for project playback" for conserving CPU power in larger projects in a seamless fashion. In a single project, you can run up to a whopping 1,000 stereo audio tracks, 1,000 instrument tracks, and 1,000 auxiliary tracks, and use up to 12 sends per channel strip. Apple continues to do a ton of tweaking beneath the surface to improve system performance on lesser machines.

For version 10.7, Apple saw fit to refresh the UI again, making its usual incremental and blink-and-you’ll-miss-it changes to the overall look. It’s all a little flatter and cleaner than before, although you still can’t do much with the color scheme. The mixer faders and meters also remained fixed in size, offering little of the configurability you’ll find in other DAWs such as Cubase, Digital Performer, and Reaper.

A Spacious Mix

The big news in version 10.7 is the introduction of Spatial Audio support with Dolby Atmos integration. As consumers have already seen, Apple Music now plays back thousands of tracks in these formats, and more importantly, it (along with Spotify and others) now plays music back in lossless encoding. This finally brings the overall sound quality level of streaming services back to the equivalent of CDs and even surpassing it in some cases.

With Logic Pro, you can now create Spatial Audio mixes and Dolby Atmos files that will play back natively in Apple Music. The idea is that you can create mixes with elevation control, moving objects in the soundscape around and even above you.

To get there, Apple includes a new 3D Object Panner, which you can use to position special effects or even the occasional instrument in three-dimensional space. Logic Pro now comes with a Dolby Atmos rendering plug-in to visualize these objects in the mix and monitor in multi-channel mode, either using a discrete speaker system or even binaurally in standard studio headphones. Apple has also expanded 13 of its bundled plug-ins to support these surround effects, including new spaces for Sound Designer. Additionally, the company revamped Logic Pro’s mixer to support metering and panning for speaker configurations up to 7.1.4.

In March 2022, the 10.7.3 update enabled spatial audio monitoring with dynamic head tracking on the AirPods Max, the AirPods Pro, the AirPods (3rd Generation), and the Beats Fit Pro. It also allows you to monitor through the Apple binaural renderer, which lets you preview your mixes in spatial audio on Apple Music. Testing these tools in depth requires many months of in-the-trenches work, but a cursory look at the features shows that the interface is clear and plenty of fun. It's not going to remove the need for a solid stereo mix, but it opens new vistas in the potential for creative ways to pan sounds. And having all this integrated within Logic Pro levels gives any engineer the ability to create these mixes at no extra cost.

The Producer Big Leagues

Apple has also added plenty of content to Logic Pro with version 10.7. The app now comes with the eight Producer Packs originally introduced in GarageBand. These include royalty-free sounds from famous producers such as Take a Daytrip, Mark Ronson, and Oak Felder, plus slap house and modern ambient sound packs among other sounds—2,800 loops, 50 kits, and 120 instrument patches in all. They sound suitably warm, fat, and immediately usable. Having new material in successive versions is always welcome, as you can never have enough sounds to inspire you.

Logic also now includes the original multitrack project of Lil Nas X’s “Montero (Call Me by Your Name)”—two of them, in fact. One is the standard multitrack project and the other is a Dolby Atmos Spatial Audio mix, which is useful for seeing what the new tools change and add. The 140-track sessions are a great inclusion just for their educational value, as the song is one of the best-produced and best-sounding songs of the year, with its flamenco-tinged trap beats, sophisticated harmonies, insanely catchy hooks, and serpentine bass lines. Seeing how it was mixed is a survey course in engineering all its own. Apple also includes the full multi-track session for Billie Eilish’s 2015 breakout hit “Ocean Eyes,” complete with all the stock plug-ins and settings her and her brother/producer Finneas O’Connell used to make the song. 

Version 10.5's Sampler was a ground-up, long-overdue reworking of Logic’s EXS24 workhorse sampling plug-in. Sampler now provides the core workstation-style sample set, including pianos, guitars, and other instruments, giving Logic a native plug-in that competes with Kontakt 6 and Halion 5 while remaining fully backward-compatible with EXS24 libraries. Sampler gives you a single window to create and edit sampler instruments in the zone waveform editor, run them through a filter section, and map the samples to different keys and dynamics levels. More importantly, you can drag and drop to it, and it supports Flex Time to preserve sample lengths regardless of pitch. 

The much smaller Quick Sampler lets you drop in single samples and immediately turn them into playable instruments from a file on your desktop, a voice memo, or another piece of audio from within Logic Pro. You can also record directly into it with a microphone, and of course, you can slice it up if you need to (the sample, not the microphone). This is another piece lifted from Ableton Live—in this case, that DAW’s Simpler plug-in. Apple also migrated Auto Sampler over from MainStage. It helps you automatically create a sampler instrument from a piece of hardware such as an external synthesizer.

My favorite Logic Pro instrument remains Alchemy, a full-blown additive, spectral, and granular synthesizer originally from Camel Audio that competes well with the $500 Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2. Plenty of other excellent instruments remain in the bin as well. Overall, Logic Pro now comes with 5,900 instrument and effect patches, 1,200 sampled instruments, and 14,750 loops.

It's Live—No, Really

Back in version 10.5, Apple responded to Ableton Live's growing influence with its own Live Loops view. Live Loops consists of columns of “cells” for composing and arranging music in real time. In this view, you can drag loops, samples, or recorded audio into the grid, and then trigger the cells in different combinations in a non-linear fashion to experiment with ideas. Unlike in the Tracks view, the Live Loops view doesn't force you to cut and paste regions into different tracks first or even to loop sections of the song.

Once you find groups of cells playing together that you like, you can arrange them in song sections called scenes—still without worrying about how long anything will play. Right-click a scene and you can change how it’s queued up or what note or beat it drops in on (via Quantize Start), and it offers duplicate, insert, and set-scene-trigger options. You can perform with it on stage, as it’s equally adept live as in the studio (hence its name). This new workflow gets at the heart of what Ableton Live’s Session view offers, except that you can still transition to Logic’s existing Tracks view afterward with all your newly composed regions intact. Additionally, you can see the Tracks and Live Loops views simultaneously and go back and forth between them while working. 

An easy way to get started with Live Loops is to dial up one of the 17 pre-loaded scenes, which are available as templates when you first make a new project. Experiment with those or delete the cells to create your own with the suggested instruments.

The Remix FX plug-in lets you perform transitions, stutter edits, gates, virtual record scratching, and other little production tricks that you can control with the mouse or via Logic Remote on an iPad or iPhone. Nifty flare-style effects follow the mouse cursor (or your finger) as you open and close the filters or trigger stutters using the customizable pads. It’s beautifully animated and had zero lag in my tests. You can strap this one across the mix bus or on individual tracks. With Logic Remote, tilting the iPad or iPhone up and down lets you tweak the filters as you play. Remix FX debuted in GarageBand, but it clearly belongs here and it’s a ton of fun. 

Apple's clever Step Sequencer evokes old drum machines and synths, but with an attractive, FL Studio-style interface with 150 built-in rhythm and melody patterns. It’s great for building beats—not just drums, but bass and melodic parts with multiple variations and even controller data automation. Like Live Loops and the Tracks view, the new Step Sequencer pulls someone like me out of the piano roll and score views I’ve been using for 30 years and into something fresh, even if I still prefer to play a MIDI keyboard when composing.

Mixing and Effects

The main mix console offers faders, pan, and other track controls, and as many inserts and sends as you need. There are 256 buses available, along with a true stereo panning option that lets you adjust the individual left and right levels instead of just attenuating either left or right signal. The mixer’s 64-bit summing engine sounds excellent, and there are welcome analog-style VCA faders available as well.

One sticking point in Logic remains the on-screen faders and metering. You can switch between pre- and post-fader, and toggle different panning laws. Apple greatly smoothed out their responses in the past couple of point updates. You get plenty of options for tuning their scale and release times, too. But on a purely visual level, the meters and channel strips themselves are still considerably smaller than what you get in Pro Tools, Steinberg Cubase, and other DAWs. Larger ones are available in Logic Remote, but then you can only see eight at once.

More flexible channel-strip sizing and placement would also be welcome. Another quirk: In order to rearrange auxiliary buses, you have to enable automation to create lanes for them in the Track view and then move them around there, which is clumsy and clutters up the UI. 

Some plug-in effects highlights: ChromaVerb delivers algorithmic reverb programs along with a colorful visual component, letting you see and shape the reverb tail. It offers lots of sweet-sounding patches, including Collins Gate (they're playing my '80s song!) and a slew of useful vocal reverbs and ambiances for different tracking situations. It’s a good complement to Space Designer, Logic’s long-running convolution reverb. The vastly improved DeEsser 2 helps minimize sibilance on vocal tracks. I’ve spent hours and hours trying (with mixed success) to get good results out of the original DeEsser. After testing, I'm pleased to report the new one is a significant step up in sound quality and is much more forgiving when you work with it. 

My favorite effects plug-in remains Logic's main Compressor, with its VCA (transparent solid state), FET, and Opto (tube-like) modes that behave differently and provide exactly the kind of warmth and crunch you'd expect from actual vintage hardware. There's a gorgeous paneled interface for each of the modes, including a dBx 160 emulation called Classic VCA and an SSL bus compressor emulation labeled Vintage VCA, although Wave's own SSL bus compressor emulation sounds better in back-to-back comparison tests, at least on vocals. Still, I can always get good results with Logic's compressor one way or another.

In all, there are more than 5,500 presets across the various 103 bundled plug-ins, plus 660 sampled convolution reverb spaces in Space Designer. The Tube EQ added back in 10.4 has also proven useful, with its Neve, API, and Pultec models. It's tough to imagine a mixing situation these tools can't cover. And although you can also master in the box and I have done so for many clients, also have a look at the excellent Izotope Ozone Advanced(Opens in a new window) for more dynamic EQ and additional tools, or even the ultra-high-end Magix Sequoia if your needs include four-point audio editing.

Audio Editing and Some Issues

Logic Pro’s audio editing tools remain comprehensive if not top of the class. Fades are generated in real time rather than stored as separate audio files. You can apply fades to multiple regions simultaneously, which helps tremendously in sound design and other post-production tasks. As before, you can write automation to regions, which makes it much simpler to move around and arrange your project without destroying recorded fader and knob movements. There are Relative and Trim modes for adjusting existing automation data, which you can use to ride a fader and smooth out an edit. Region Gain is somewhat similar to Clip Gain, one of my favorite features in Pro Tools. It makes it easy to quickly adjust a region that for whatever reason is recorded at a different level, without having to resort to inserting a plug-in or a destructive edit. It requires a few more clicks than Pro Tools does, though, and you really feel it when doing several hours of edits on a lead vocal.

Flex Pitch and Flex Time make quick work of tuning vocals and fixing mistakes in recorded audio tracks. Flex Pitch in particular remains a great freebie if you're used to working with an entirely separate app (such as Melodyne). I've used it extensively at this point. With careful edits, I find it to be as transparent as you could possibly want, and I love not having to export and re-import tuned vocals each time.

As with any application so large and enduring, Logic has some quirks that have yet to be remedied. Anyone working in commercial music, particularly in scoring for episodic television or film, may have come across how you can't lock tempo events to SMPTE timecode. (SMPTE refers to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, and SMPTE timecode is a widely used standard for labeling individual frames of film or video on a timeline.) Even if you use separate Logic sessions for each cue, each could require multiple tempos—and if you're using Beat Mapping and need to adjust one section's tempo to accommodate a director's change, and that section comes before an event that's fixed to a frame, it can throw the entire cue off. Although you can technically lock the music to a frame by SMPTE-locking the regions, the cue will no longer have any relation to the metronome, and all the other sections you're not working on will move from their initial positions.

Some other fiddly bits in the day-to-day workflow remain. For example, you still can’t change the default folders for your projects and bounces, which is problematic on Macs with small internal SSDs. If you use a lot of instrument patches, you’ll end up with a cluttered project with extraneous aux buses. Logic combines reverb buses when possible, but you still end up with 10 or more in every new project pretty easily. Clicking on Enable Patch Merging and disabling Sends stops this behavior, but you have to do that for every single project. New software instrument tracks always start with Classic Electric Piano unless you uncheck the Open Library box, and inexplicably, you can’t change the electric piano default to something else.

Still the Logical Choice

There are hundreds of other excellent features I can't discuss here, many of which have been with the program for years. With the latest update, and despite the issues I've already described, Apple keeps Logic Pro at the forefront of the DAW market. Any quibbles with the program—and some are to be expected, given its sheer breadth and depth—pale in comparison with its virtues. For $199.99, Logic Pro turns your Mac into a music studio that was simply impossible on this scale even just 10 years ago, let alone that it’s the same software pros use on a regular basis. 

The competition is well established and fierce, but much of it costs more. Avid Pro Tools, MOTU Digital Performer, and Cubase—what used to be considered the other three major established DAWs years ago that are still around today—remain hundreds of dollars more expensive and usually require either hardware copy protection, subscription fees for support, or some combination of those added costs. Perhaps the most compelling higher-end DAW is Ableton Live, which commands a rabid following for its unique composition and live performance-oriented UI. Once Logic added Live Loops, Ableton Live gained a new, fierce enemy. No fan of Live’s deep Max MSP and modular synth plug-ins will find what they want in Logic, but new producers with their eye on an Ableton Push 2 may find joy in Logic Pro and Logic Remote instead. On the lower end, Logic also sees competition from PreSonus Studio One, the utilitarian-but-bargain-priced Cockos Reaper, and long-standing electronic-dance-music favorites FL Studio and Reason. 

At this point, Logic Pro has serious celebrity cred; Daniel Pemberton, the composer for Black Mirror, used the program to score Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, while the aforementioned top producers are on record as using Logic Pro as well. Many commercial studios in the US remain committed to Avid's Pro Tools. But it's getting tougher to justify the costs of Pro Tools, given how capable Logic Pro has become, especially when coupled with high-end Apogee or Universal Audio hardware.

Logic Pro is a stellar recording, editing, mixing, and post-production environment. If you have a Mac and haven't decided on a proper songwriting, recording, or mixing program yet, or if you're aching to upgrade from an earlier version of Logic or even GarageBand (project files from which still open seamlessly in Logic), Logic Pro is your best bet. It's an Editors' Choice winner for DAWs. That said, Pro Tools is another Editors' Choice winner because it's an excellent if expensive tool. If you're already invested in Pro Tools, you may well want to stick with it. If you're committed to working on a PC, it's the clear winner, as Logic Pro is only available on Macs. GarageBand also wins top honors because it's stunningly powerful for a free app that comes with every new Mac.

Pros

• Effective new Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio tools

• Large array of bundled instruments and effects

• No copy protection, unlike many competitors

• Excellent value

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Cons

• Can't lock tempo events to SMPTE

• Mixer could use larger meters and faders

• Still no fast Clip-Gain-style audio editing

The Bottom Line

Apple Logic Pro adds integrated Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio music production in version 10.7 while retaining its core excellence. It’s a stellar update to a best-in-class DAW, and if you already own Logic Pro, it's free.

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