Logic Express

» see apple.com/logicexpress as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Logic Express was the version of Apple's music software you bought when you did not have a studio. Apple announced it on 15 January 2004 next to Logic Pro 6 and shipped both that March. The split between them was easy to describe. Pro carried the full collection of instruments and effects along with Pro Tools TDM support. Express had the same sequencer and the same audio engine with a shorter list of everything else.

Both came out of Emagic, the Hamburg company Apple had bought in July 2002. Logic went back to the Atari ST under the name Notator, and by the time Apple owned it the product line had grown a confusing ladder of its own with Silver and Gold and Platinum editions. Pro and Express was the cleanup.

It kept pace with its sibling for seven years. Logic Express 7 arrived on 29 September 2004 alongside Logic Pro 7. Express 8 shipped on 12 September 2007, the same day Logic Pro stopped being sold by itself and went inside the Logic Studio box, and Express stayed a separate product because being separate was the entire point of it. Logic Express 9 landed on 21 August 2009 at $199 and was the last one.

~ the record ~

~ the reseller notice ~

On Thursday 8 December 2011 Apple told its resellers that the boxed versions of Logic Studio and Logic Express were discontinued, effective immediately. The same day Logic Pro 9 appeared in the Mac App Store at $199.99, with MainStage 2 beside it at $29.99, both sold as separate downloads. Soundtrack Pro, the third application that had been in the Logic Studio box, was not offered at all. Wikipedia dates the announcement to 9 December and the trade press posted it on the 8th, which is also when the store listings went live.

The arithmetic is what finished Express. Logic Pro had been $499 in a box and was now $199.99 as a download, which put it ninety-nine cents above what Express had cost. Apple never had to announce that the middle tier was going away, because the middle tier had only ever been a price.

~ the version that never ran on a pc ~

Logic ran on Windows until Apple bought Emagic and said it would not, and that call was made in 2002, before Express existed. So the cheap tier was Mac software from its first day, which in Turkey in the mid 2000s meant it may as well have been sold on another planet. My machines came out of parts catalogs and got argued about on Turkish hardware forums, where your signature line was your motherboard and your RAM timings.

Music on those machines meant FruityLoops, or whatever Cubase build was going around. The idea of paying $199 in a currency that was not the lira for the junior edition of a sequencer, to run on a computer nobody in that crowd owned, did not come up. Express had a seven-year life and most of it overlaps my university years, spent on a machine I had assembled myself.

~ the ladder after 2011 ~

What was left after December 2011 had two rungs instead of three. GarageBand stayed on every Mac, and Logic Pro stayed at $199.99, a price it held when Logic Pro X replaced it on 16 July 2013 and for years afterward. Existing Express installs kept working, since they were already on the disk and nobody could take them back, but they stopped getting updates and eventually stopped running on new versions of macOS.

Final Cut Express had gone the same way six months earlier, in June 2011, when Final Cut Pro X arrived at $299 in the same store. Apple ran the same move twice inside one year, on two different product families, and the junior edition did not come along either time.

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