Based on what I was doing and planning to still do the bulk of the writing in Ableton the engineer told me I should be fine with Logic Express. From what I've seen here are some of the things you get with Logic and not Logic Express.
1. limited to 12 audio inputs - That's already 10 more than I need.
2. Less effects and instruments - I have plenty of plugins so this doesn't bother me.
3. No markers - I've gone this long without the arrangement telling me where the chorus is so why start now.
4. Can't map faders, knobs, buttons, etc. on your controllers - That pisses me off, but whatever.
Those would all be cool features to have, but not $700 more cool.
I also got some Logic training DVD videos. So I dump in one of my songs into Logic Express and start watching the videos, bouncing between watching videos and applying things to my song. I'm about 12 videos deep and it's still just telling me how to set the thing up. WTF? I spend several hours just setting up the song and making it pretty. Some of the stuff Ableton just does automatically, like routing the audio to the matching mixer track when you move the track on the arrangement. After those productive hours I decide to call it a night and save the song. I saved it twice. Once just using save and also as a project which copies all the audio files as well.
The next day I go to open the song to finally work on something and during the loading it tells me the audio files can't be found, opening from either file I saved it as. I'm staring right at the files and it tells me it can't find them. I use the method to load them manually, but not only do the file names not match (which it should have named itself in project save) but I click on every single audio file in the folder and it keeps telling me "No, that's not it". For fuck sake.
Blah. I just went back into working on things in Ableton and I got a lot more done applying what I learned in the studio….but not using "logic".