Logic Pro 8 brought with it a number of completely new effects, alongside important upgrades for much of its current plug-in line-up. While all plug-ins benefit from the overall interface redesign and new low-latency mode, software instruments in particular benefit from additional functionality and brand-new features. Software Instrument Live Mode has become more CPU-efficient and multi-output instruments now employ automatic aux-channel creation for their additional outputs. Also, instruments such as EXS24, ES2, EFM1, Sculpture and Ultrabeat have undergone substantial revamps, bringing new features and useful tweaks to their interfaces and functionality. I'll start exploring these welcome changes by taking a look at the general enhancements, before examining the upgraded instruments in closer detail.

New to Logic 8, the low-latency mode affects the use of all plug-ins (not just software instruments) by limiting the maximum latency that the plug-in can add to a track's signal path. Enabling low-latency mode may bypass a number of plug-ins on the track's channel strip (or its related auxes, or even output channels) in order to keep the delay time below the set value. The highest-latency plug-ins will be bypassed first. This mode is especially useful when playing or monitoring software instruments with high-latency plug-ins in their signal flow. Although this process inevitably changes the sound (to varying degrees), it is a useful short-term measure to help achieve a tighter performance during recording. For playback or mixing, of course, using delay compensation would make far more sense, as this allows perfect alignment of tracks without changing the sound.

As the name suggests, Software Instrument Live mode is specific to software instrument tracks. It is not new to Logic 8 but, as mentioned above, its behaviour has been modified to make it more CPU-efficient. In Logic 7, selecting a software instrument track would immediately switch...