mackie hui logic control for pro tools review

Logic Control, with the required Logic 5 update, took Emagic slightly longer than expected to ship to the public, and it later transpired that Emagic's exclusivity agreement with Mackie was time-limited. However, you don't have to use Pro Tools or have a big budget to add hardware control to your own computer system companies like JL Cooper, GMedia, Kenton, Peavey, Radikal and Evolution have for many years offered generic control surfaces suitable for a range of budgets and software, with varying degrees of functionality - some models work by simply generating MIDI Continuous Controller information, for example.Įmagic turned heads at the 2001 Frankfurt Musikmesse when they announced Logic Control, a desirable control surface for Logic designed in conjunction with Mackie that seemed to finally offer a serious project-studio-level control surface at a reasonable price.

However, the Pro Control's impressive feature set comes at a correspondingly high price tag, with the base, Fader and Edit Pack expander units costing £9758, £5282 and £6098 respectively, putting the system out of the reach of many home and project studios.įocusrite, in cooperation with Digidesign, would later bring out the more affordable Control 24 in 2001, a non-expandable control surface featuring 24 motorised, touch-sensitive faders, VU metering, a host of editing controls, and 16 preamps similar to those found in Focusrite's Platinum range. Pro Control is still going strong, and an optional Edit Pack was later made available offering a QWERTY keyboard, two joystick panners for surround work, and more. In 1999, Digidesign released their own highly desirable control surface for Pro Tools, Pro Control, consisting of an eight-fader base unit which also featured a host of other mixing and transport controls, with optional eight-fader Fader Pack expander units also available, giving the user the choice of how many physical faders they wanted in their system. HUI has since become supported by other software packages such as Steinberg's Cubase and Nuendo, and the command set used to communicate with HUI has also become something of a standard, emulated by many other devices.

Perhaps the first significant control surface for a desktop DAW that really mimicked the design of a mixer was Mackie's HUI (Human User Interface), which was launched for use with Pro Tools in 1998, offering eight channel strips with LED VU metering, along with transport and other editing and mixing controls. Of course, developers of digital audio workstations have long been aware of this deficiency, and their solution has been to design something that looks and works like a mixer, but which only sends and responds to control information to and from the workstation, leaving the audio signal path alone. To use the obligatory car/technology metaphor, you'd never consider driving by manipulating an on-screen steering wheel with a mouse, so why should those in the audio industry control visual faders with the same rodent-inspired device? And while this criticism has become something of a cliché, it still remains true that a large number of users simply don't want to use standard computer devices, such as the mouse, to carry out mixing and other common tasks with a digital audio workstation. If you asked a musician or engineer to suggest the biggest problem with computer-based audio systems, the chances are they'd grieve over the lack of a suitable tactile user interface for working with music and audio. The original Mackie Control has just been superseded by Mackie Control Universal, which offers the same support for Emagic's Logic as Logic Control.īuilding on the success of previous mixer and control surface designs, Mackie's affordable Mackie Control promises the best of the soft- and hardware worlds - but will it make you hang up your mouse?

Mackie hui logic control for pro tools review