My main DAW is Logic Pro 9 and I love it dearly. I've been a Logic user since the early Emagic days, and despite some a rough start when Apple first took over (Logic 7.0 ... shudder) it's progressed well to the point where Logic Pro 9 is really very stable and has a great workflow.

Can you feel the "but..." coming?

BUT - Logic 9 has a very nasty "feature" that I believe Apple have implemented to dumb it down a bit and ease the transition from GarageBand, and it causes terrible problems if you work with direct ins and outs on a desk and expect audio to be routed out to the same channel it came in on.

Specifically, Outputs 1 and 2 are essentially permanently reserved as a stereo pair. Not only can you not rename "Stereo Output," but you can't actually separate the channels - it looks like you can, but the audio doesn't get routed as you would expect. So if you want to work in mono on those first two channels, you're pretty much screwed. There is a workaround by messing with the environment (details on request) but it's very easily overwritten by creating a new track assigned to Stereo Output.

I've had to resolve this by just not using outputs 1-8 at all. Luckily I have an SSL MADI/AlphaLink setup with plenty of channels, so I now have channels 9-16 plumbed into channels 1-8 of my desk, and channels 17-24 into my summing box. I've adjusted all the I/O labels in Logic and now I'm free of the "Stereo Output" tyranny. The cost being that I am wasting 8 channels of conversion.

I really hope Apple address this in a future release; I'm not really sure it dumbs things down in a useful way, and this is supposed to be "Pro" software. Do it in Express if you want to, but in Pro let me route my audio how I want it.