Bit geeky this one, probably only to be understood by those who've used Logic 7 on the Mac for any serious work. Got to get it off my chest though!
Note: this list is not exhaustive.
WORST: Transposing a note up or down in the Matrix editor after using the 'go to marker' / 'next / previous marker' key commands MOVES the successive markers in the song to the current SPL position, one marker moved per semitone transposed. It doesn't matter if the marker track is protected or if you've got Global Tracks on or not. You can't undo this. You just have to move all the markers back to where they were before.
Demixing a region by event channel automatically creates tracks on the arrange using different audio objects to the one you're working on and puts the demixed regions on those. Not a big problem, because they can be moved, but if those new audio objects happen to have been frozen using Track Freeze, you have to unfreeze them all just to move the new regions off and back to the original instrument, then refreeze them all. Freezing takes ages.
Third party AU instruments' buffers are not cleared by Logic after a song stop, so zeroing the SPL and pressing play results in a buffer discharge noise of whatever sample was loaded into memory while playing before. While this can be cleared by just stopping, zeroing and playing again, it gets caught in the freeze files too - so you have to refreeze any tracks that have the discharged sample stuck in their start. The buffers also get caught in bounces, whether offline or realtime.
It doesn't chase some automation data unless you play from bar 1. Automation data cannot easily be copied and pasted without nasty methods and often with bad results. The grab area for the nodes is WAY too big so you end up grabbing the wrong one ALL THE TIME unless you zoom right in. You can't make a 'step' without sliding an automation node forwards to the same position as the next node - this can't be done by sliding the next node back into position cos you get a ramp instead. Tempo automation works in a completely different way to ordinary automation - it's way more fiddly and almost impossible to use sensibly (and bizarrely more powerful). You STILL can't do LFO / sinusoidal / exponential / hyperbolic curves - it's parabolic curves only, which is rubbish. And you can't accurately automate a plugin's Bypass control, or master Mute - even with all the 'sample accurate automation' settings turned on. Logic doesn't offer sample accurate automation.
Logic doesn't offer sample-accurate edits of anything in the arrange, including audio. Yes, really.
No decent audio editor. The one in Logic doesn't even display decibel levels on the vertical scale.... well there's a whole host of things it doesn't do actually. It's a piece of shit.
Export selection as MIDI file inserts tons of bars' rest at the start of the file instead of just trimming to your SELECTION as it should. It won't save program changes, but it quite happily inserts cinematic hit points into the file for each marker - why? - and offers no settings for altering any of this.
Using the Close Window key command for an editor FORGETS the settings of that window (zoom, size, link, playback midi etc). If you want it to remember the settings (why wouldn't you??), you have to remember to use the mouse and click the red button. A waste of time, every time.
The vertical zoom levels in the Matrix editor are too wide - you can't get the in-between levels required for easy editing - at points it appears to double in size vertically each time you zoom. And they've moved the handy little zoom telescopes to opposite corners of the screen when they were clearly better placed next to each other! And you can't zoom in on the Environment, a place where you really need to be able to for complex close wiring jobs.
BIG ANNOYANCE: If you open a song, then open another song on top to grab something (eg. a region or a channel strip setting), when you go back to the first song - which is STILL OPEN - it reloads all of the samples for the sample instruments into memory for the ENTIRE SONG. Which can take several minutes, depending on the song. It can take half an hour to copy a few tracks from one song to another because of this, even though you've got both songs open at the same time.
You can set Save Channel Strip Setting As... and Copy Channel Strip Setting up to be key commands, but it's not enough to select the desired track in the Mixer / Environment and use the key command for this to work. The track must be selected in the Arrange, or you'll save the wrong track's settings. Big time-waster figuring this out for the first time, especially when trying to use multiple song files at the same time (see above).
The Physical Input object in the Environment is useless for anyone with a mobile setup, because, while the wiring is all position-stable, the device inputs aren't. So unless you plug in and turn on all of your gear in exactly the same order every time, things will be wired through to the wrong place. Unless you resign to filtering after the SUM (useless for anyone who wants to use more than 16 midi channels), it takes a good deal of time to figure out how to get this to work properly, and God help you if you buy any more MIDI gear because you'll most likely have to rewire EVERY SONG.
It's WAY too easy to slightly misfire when double-clicking the top insert in the Mixer, and accidentally click the little strip settings arrow instead. You'll most likely hit Next Channel Strip Setting with your second click... which then wipes all the plugins out for that channel. You can't undo 'Next Channel Strip Setting' so you either have to revert to a previously saved version of the song or start the mix again.
It doesn't display audio object / track names in the Send selection lists, so you're left trying to remember whether you had your reverb on Bus 17 or Bus 19 instead of just being able to choose "Reverb Bus" (or whatever you've actually CALLED it) from the list. You can rename the Channel identifiers themselves from "Bus 17" to "Reverb Bus"... but this is a global setting for every single song. (You can only ever find this out the hard way.)
The ES2 has a nasty habit of forgetting your sound once in a while and creating its own. The weird thing is that it LOOKS exactly the same as the sound you made - all the dials are in the same places - but it sounds totally wrong. No reason for it - you just have to be sure you've got the plugin settings saved or you're up shit creek. If you use ES2 on stage, the probability of it exhibiting this annoying behaviour at a crucial point in your set is roughly 1.
Logic's handling of MIDI-In data SUCKS. If using a keyboard, the thing sometimes just.............. hangs ...................ANDTHENPLAYSALL the notes at once, often going out of time with itself in the process. This is worse with third party AU plugins, of course, but it happens with Logic's own softsynths too. In fact be prepared to externally clock Logic if you want it to behave when you're using it as a playable synth and sequencer on stage, because it frequently displays the most extraordinary tempo drift (you really notice it if you're running two laptops with Logic and some sequenced material on each).
FINALLY - where the hell are the updates, Apple? Logic 7's been out for YEARS and the other DAWs are way out in front now in terms of usability and stability. If it wasn't for the good stuff (which I should say is REALLY REALLY good), I'd drop Logic in favour of one of the others tomorrow and not look back.
