When it comes to multitrack recording, we've fiddled with them all: 4-track Porta Ones, 24-track 2-inch reels, and ADAT hardware; and Master Tracks, Deck, and Cubase software. For producing professional, commercial-quality work, MOTU’s Digital Performer 3 is one of the most intensive, full-fledged audio-recording and -sequencing packages we've ever worked with — it features every software widget imaginable to record audio, sequence MIDI, notate orchestrations, spot to movies, mix Dolby 5.1 surround-sound audio, and more. It's not as pretty or easy to use as Cubase, and some of the audio effects aren’t as intuitive as their real-world hardware counterparts, but Digital Performer 3's sophistication rivals that of most software recording packages.
Digital Performer 3 has everything you need to take an audio project from recording infancy to the final mastering process. Including 24-bit, 96kHz audio; over 50 real-time effects; a waveform editor; a notator; complete automation; SMPTE time-code support; and complete mastering tools (such as surround-sound mixing). It's enough to make any hard-core audio geek cry with joy, though some tools may be superfluous for MIDI-centric users. With audio and MIDI tracks, only your Mac’s processor speed and RAM limit the number of simultaneous tracks you can work with... Digital Performer also supports most audio I/O devices, including all current DigiDesign interfaces, all ASIO-compatible devices, Sound Manager, and MOTU’s own interfaces, such as the 828 FireWire audio interface...
Version 3 sports a makeover from version 2 and some new features, including multiprocessor optimization, VocAlign (for quick dialog overdubs), support for multiple surround sound (including 5.1 and 10.2), QuickTime spotting (for scoring QuickTime movies), Pro Tools import and export, and audio-CD importing. It also offers 14 new plug-ins, including tools that simulate vintage plate reverbs, convert audio to MIDI trigger pulses, gate in real-time, generate surround-sound delays, and master surround bass.
Though the un-Mac-like interface takes time to dissect, we like its modularity, which let us customize our onscreen workspace. You can call up any number of windows at the push of a button (including a Tracks Overview window, Sequence Editor, Graphic Editor, Drum Editor, QuickScribe Editor, and Mixing Board), or create sets that launch only the windows you want.
We recorded audio, with no noticeable latency, via the 828 on a 400MHz G4 with 192MB of RAM. Without a piano, we created an authentic-sounding piano accompaniment in the QuickScribe Editor (using QuickTime Musical Instruments), though inputting the final notes as a string of sixteenths became frustrating when Digital Performer kept stacking the arpeggio notes into intervals. The Mixing Board made us feel more at home, and we liked the automation, which put an end to our screw-ups during live mix-downs.
Digital Performer lets you resculpt audio and MIDI tracks like Silly Putty, so you can fix practically anything, even after recording. You can do everyday edits — cropping out noise, nudgingaudio tracks, and adding effects (reverb, echo, delay, chorus, gate, EQ, preamp, and more). And you can perform seemingly impossible feats of audio wizardry, such as bringing an off-key singer back on key, time-crunching a song to a specific length without affecting pitch. and banishing an instrument’s dissonant harmonic overtones. We easily pushed a stray note back on the beat and drew a volume curve to fade out a guitar track right before its screeching feedback kicked in.
Our favorite feature, PureDSP Pitch Shift, let us record our voice track in a comfortable register and then easily transpose it up a couple of keys to fake a remarkable vocal range convincingly. The track retained the same tempo and length, and we sounded like ourselves — not like some giddy chipmunk — after the transposition. We also used the Pitch Shift feature to wrangle a few flat notes and pull them up to pitch (not easy), and the results impressed us: The edit was virtually transparent on playback. Also great is the Scale Time function, which compressed our 34-second clip to exactly 30 seconds without affecting pitch — invaluable for radio and TV ad work where audio must fit an exact time slot.
The graphical tools (such as pencil, reshape, scrub, and loop) let you magnify the guts of any audio wave and hack away at the most minute details — just don’t get carried away by the visuals and ignore your ears. The pencil tool helped us make tiny volume cuts to notch out string noise in our guitar track, but our attempt to satisfactorily draw in volume swells on an orchestrated string track took three times longer than if we had done it the old-fashioned way (via the Mixing Board’s fader).
We have a few quibbles with Digital Performer. Dialing up effects with the onscreen controls is incredibly awkward. For example, when we grabbed a Delay knob with our cursor to crank up the milliseconds as we would in the real world (or in Cubase), the knob started to turn clockwise and then abruptly scampered off in the opposite direction. Clicking the knob and dragging our cursor skyward increased the delay, while dragging southward decreased it. With numerical fields, when we clicked and dragged to the right, the values increased, but when we dragged to the left, the number surprisingly increased further. Sure, we can type in the exact values, but damn it, where’s the fun in that? Also, though Digital Performer includes many wonderful effects plug-ins, it doesn’t support the hugely popular VST plug-in format.
All in all, Digital Performer 3 is like a musical magic wand that lets you create virtually flawless and rich-sounding audio projects that are as simple or complex as you choose. Whether you’re an industry pro looking to go digital, an audio-tweaking freak, ora less-than-stellar musician in need of a secret weapon, DP3 is simply amazing.
Fong, Kris. (February 2002). MOTU Digital Performer 3. MacAddict. (pgs. 58-59).
Digital Performer 3
Mark of the Unicorn (MOTU)
Applications
out of 10 (1 vote)
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2015-03-17 / 
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DP3-STUFF.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
