Rumors have swirled around Apple’s flagship music and audio software since the company first absorbed Emagic. In the absence of a Logic update, the rumors are back. This time, they come from an unusual source: former Emagic employee Philippe Brodu, in his blog “Le Sith de Feeleebee.”

Des collectors Emagic : ça vous intéresse ?
Logic 8 : Une nouvelle pièce au puzzle !

An excited French reader on Gearslutz.com’s message forum sums it up this way:

There will be no Logic 8!!!!!

The new app will have a new name.
They are working on it for 5 years and it will be out this year.
It will be a “Pro Tools Killer” with a Logic feel but in a new user interface and take advantage of OSX.5 (it will need it and don’t work on X.4 or prior) and new Apple hardware (touch screen display!).

More info: no more xskey and no more envirronement [sic]

Whoo, and it’ll make cappuccino! And it’ll have support for a new, high-definition replacement for MIDI that Apple will push to become an industry standard! (Not sure which of those is less likely, actually.)

Before you rule this out, though, there’s a well-reasoned argument for it at Barbarism Begins at Home:

Will There Be No Logic 8?

Fortunately, I happen to know absolutely nothing about future versions of Logic, so I think I can safely speculate, secure in the knowledge that anything I say that does happen to be true is entirely coincidental. A “Pro Tools killer” says more about the sales of the resulting product than the product itself, though I’m sure Apple would like to make some bigger inroads in Digidesign’s market the way Final Cut did with Avid. (Though there are plenty of Avid editors out there, still.)

I know enough to say this: the successor to Logic may be a huge upgrade, and may even have a new name, but it’ll still be aimed at musicians and will likely remain connected to the core of Logic and GarageBand. Beyond that, we can say anything we like and amuse the people at Apple (a number of whom read this site); they know more than we do.

Remember patent 0060026536? It’s the multi-touch, gestural patent Apple filed that was clearly the precursor of the Apple iPhone. Here’s the curious thing: the iPhone, as demonstrated at the Macworld keynote, isn’t all that focused on multi-touch. With the exception of Apple’s clever zooming gesture, most gestures are single-touch. Most are horizontal and vertical strokes similar to what you can already do on laptop touchpads.

A lot of what gets put into patents never shows up in shipping products, but I would be very surprised if Apple’s multi-touch abilities didn’t start to spread to new stuff. Touchscreens and eventually multi-touchscreens are likely to appear on more computers, PC and Mac alike. And other devices have likely lacked touchscreens only because the digitizer hardware — and the processors to deal with tracking multiple touches — hadn’t yet reached the right economy of scale, something that’s likely to happen soon (the iPhone in June being a good indicator). Phones have the advantage of subsidies from the phone carriers — the iPhone would presumably cost hundreds more if it didn’t have Cingular reducing the cost to get you on a 2-year plan. But the touch trend is likely to continue.

And that brings us back to the original patent. Could Apple in fact be working on a music mixer or other touch-enabled music interface? Or was this just a demonstration of an idea they had, and not a working product? Time will tell. I’ll repeat my concerns: touch is great in its flexibility, but losing tactile feedback is not — maybe something Apple themselves have discovered. But that’s unlikely to stop manufacturers from integrating touch into products for musicians in the near future, whether it’s Apple or someone else. And it won’t just be the Lemur.

Okay, no remaining stories this week will have headlines in the form of a question; I promise. “NAMM: New DJ Hardware????”

Music makers think that if they leak some teaser photos of upcoming devices, we’ll write it up. They’re right.

Native Instruments has released to CDM a small image of what appears to be an upcoming Traktor hardware device, as posted originally to the NI Traktor Forum. (Well, actually, I’m assuming that it’s part of Traktor: months after Native Instruments announces it’s dumping its long-term relationship with Stanton and Final Scratch, it posts what’s obviously part of a computer audio interface to its Traktor forum. You do the math.) Most interesting here is that it’s got 8 audio output channels. And a … hook. I’m too tired to analyze this, but I do hope I get invited to parties with 7.1 surround mixes.

See the post from “native girl” on the NI Forum.

NI isn’t alone. M-Audio is also teasing hardware … also for DJs … though bizarrely on MySpace. (That’s apparently where all the cool kids hang out, except Team CDM, because burns! It burns!)

Sneak Peek from M-Audio

Tom at Music thing got the jump on the upcoming controller, first decided it was for Ableton Live, then decided M-Audio has divorced Ableton and it’s not for Live.

There’s an easy answer to this question: the upcoming controller will probably be both. M-Audio’s X-Session Pro works just fine with both Torq and (via MIDI) Ableton Live; it even says as much in the docs. M-Audio is still bundling Live Lite with their gear. And the more copies Ableton sells of Live, the more potential customers M-Audio has for Oxygen, Ozone, Trigger Finger, X-Session, and so on. Finally, despite the fact that Live is a great DJ app, the kind of DJs who would primarily use Torq and those who would primarily use Live seem to be a pretty different demographic.

Nor is the hardware much of a mystery in this “teaser”: glowing Jolly Rancher color scheme, crossfader, EQ, effects (or whatever you happen to want to assign), and what appears to be clip triggers. I happen to like using DJ-style control schemes for Ableton Live even in non-DJ music sets, so I’ll be interested to see how this works out. And this fills a hole left by the X-Session Pro, which doesn’t have enough dedicated controls for some users. The only real mystery is what to call it. X-Session Pro Pro? Torqtroller? Or M-Audio could continue their gaseous theme (Ozone, Oxygen) with Carbon Dioxide. They call it pollution. We call it life.

Native Instruments’ bold claims that KORE is “the worldÃŒs first Universal Sound Platform” continue to earn skepticism from some parties online. But even with over a month to go before KORE’s release, there are some indications of how KORE might evolve. Here’s CDM’s current outlook on the situation:

Moog fever is now officially out of control. As anxious Moog fans wait for the announcement of — some new synth — March 29, they’ll take any tiny crumb suggesting details of the new instrument. Even when it’s wrong.

Case in point: the Moog Solar, which sites like Gearjunkies have been declaring “the new Moog”. Calm down; it’s not. Long-time followers of Moog Music’s differently-colored special editions of their flagship Voyager synth know that this is just their special electric blue Voyager (shown) re-released in electric . . . orange. Looks damn cool, but it costs US$3200 in an exclusive deal from Nova Musik. The free Moog Movie DVD they’re throwing in doesn’t really make up for the hundreds you’re paying for the color. Stick with blue and buy a nice Moogerfooger for yourself. Unless you’re, like, Herbie Hancock, in which case, buy a dozen.

No, hopes remain high that what Moog is planning is a “Moog for the rest of us” mini-Voyager or Voyager Lite. All bets are off next Wednesday.

In the meantime, Tom Whitwell is trying to explain to the general tech crowd why we’re so passionate about this story. You already know, of course, but check the link for a fantastic album cover, Country Moog.

As we reported last month, Moog Music is expected to announce new hardware at the Musikmesse show in Frankfurt, Germany. The suspense is apparently driving people nuts, reports Music thing. So, in a market where we generally don’t get the silly Photoshop mockups that, imaginary Mac gear and cellphones get, we suddenly have (tongue-in-cheek) ideas of what this future Moog equipment might look like.

My personal favorite, from Vintage Synth Explorer, is Amos’ Femto-Moog, with ultra-simplified design and a one-octave keyboard. You know, for DJs.

There was a time when skeptics thought mice would never catch on. “People will never give up their QWERTY keyboards,” they said. They were half right: now we take both for granted.

Now, more experiments in multi-touch interfaces are appearing by the day. Aside from mysterious Apple patents, we have, via We Make Money Not Art, new research in multi-touch interactions from a team led by Jefferson Han. (Demos pictured.) This isn’t just any touchscreen: not only does it recognize multiple fingers as inputs, but it projects whatever imagery you want in response, enabling new, fluid interfaces, and even responds to force feedback.

With the Web abuzz about Apple’s latest patent, filing, it’s worth reading the actual patent, 0060026536. Like all patent filings, this research may never translate to a shipping product. But it does make for good reading, and it clears up some issues — the most important one being this is about gestures, not specific hardware. Oh, and yes, Apple is working on a touchscreen music mixer:

The rumored polyphonic and low-cost Moog synths were no-shows at NAMM but that didn’t mean there wasn’t anything to get excited about in the Moog booth. Owners of the Voyager Rack Mount edition are about to get their wish for more expansion capability in the form of the VX-352 CV input expander. The VX-352 turns the synth into a full-fledged mini-modular system by allowing it to easily accommodate external CV gear.

Okay, benchmarking geeks, here’s a word problem for you: Apple’s iMac with a 2.0 GHz Intel Core Duo is twice as fast as the old iMac with a 2.1 GHz G5. How does it compare to a Power Mac? Hard to say, especially since only some apps are native on the new chip, but here’s a sobering stat: in terms of Macworld.com’s Speedmark test, the Quad-Core 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 only bests a 2.1 GHz G5 iMac by 257 to 190. That means, running native code (soon to include Logic Pro), the iMac could perform as well or significantly better than a more expensive Power Mac. Don’t rush out and buy the iMac just yet, but can anyone explain?

Intel in Macs [Apple.com]

Okay, we’ve already got one reader who seems to think that true quad optimization will boost performance of the Power Mac. But that’s part of the point: a lot of Mac apps aren’t optimized for Velocity Engine or multi-processor, whereas compiling a universal binary — as is happening with the Apple apps — will be significantly easier. I think that will give the iMacs an edge on those applications, but I’m honestly not sure: way too many variables here. There’s a reason this story is posed as a question. Other folks want to chime in? -PK