Avid still blocking simple features in the non-HD version, like linking record button on multiple tracks Beside that, I love working on Pro Tools! I moved to this from Logic Pro 9 about two months ago. Up till now I've done lots of producing in it and I'm very happy about it.
Logic was a very cramped and dark program for my feel. It also had quite a few bugs that put me off. I got the Academic version of Pro Tools It's freaking cheap!
And it's lifelong use and 4 years free updates. It's got all the features of the full price version, just cheaper. I couldn't be happier with this DAW. I do quite a lot of audio recordings, not much MIDI. It's great for recording. Pro Tools can be quite daunting for those who are less technically inclined. Poor company support. So if you decide to use Pro Tools, be sure to get tied in to the user communities for support. Pro Tools is still a great choice for recording. But depending on your particular style of music and the way you like to work, you may find other DAWs will help you capture your creative ideas more efficiently.
His previous job titles include recording engineer, live sound engineer, and general manager for an independent record label. I am about to upgrade from Garageband and was wondering whether I should get Logic next or Pro Tools. From your review here, Pro Tools sounds too advanced for me. I like what you said about other programs being more creative for the songwriter. Do you think Logic would be better as a next step from Garageband, or perhaps another program?
Paul: Excellant review, and spot-on. I, like many others do everything myself in a home studio. I started with Cubase, then went to Logic a few years ago. Around that same time, I took my first look at Pro Tools, and while it is great as you said for multiple tracks, editing and such, I found it not too composer friendly when it comes to loops, MIDI etc.
Your email address will not be published. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting. Pro Tools 10 is a watershed release for Avid's industry-standard music and audio creation system.
And, if this wasn't already enough for existing users to consider, Avid are also taking the opportunity to encourage the adoption of various support and maintenance packages, both new and existing, alongside more traditional upgrade options.
If the previous hardware transition from Mix to HD is any indication, HD systems will continue to be used in studios, both private and commercial, for at least the next three to five years, which means that Pro Tools 10 is a fairly important release for HD users.
However, with Pro Tools 9 having added support for completely native systems beyond those previously catered for by Pro Tools LE, there is now an increasing number of people running the software without any Avid hardware at all. This means that Pro Tools 10 is, arguably, a release that's going to represent something different depending on the hardware you're using. Given that Pro Tools exists as both a hardware and a software platform, we're going to split the review of Pro Tools 10 and the new HDX cards into two parts.
This article is going to focus on the software, while next month's follow-up will cover the new HDX hardware and AAX plug-in format. Fortunately, the application remains compatible with Snow Leopard Windows users need to be running Windows 7 SP1. Although the software will run on either or bit variants of Mac OS X and Windows, Pro Tools 10 is, to the dismay of many, still a bit application. This is slightly surprising given the climate into which Pro Tools 10 is being released, where many competitors have already introduced bit support, and there is clearly demand from users, especially by those using large, sample-based instruments.
However, Avid have at least planted the seed for bit support in Pro Tools 10, as we'll see in a moment. As is often the case with updates, many of the improvements are numeric, and Pro Tools 10 is no exception, with some users benefiting from increased numbers of voices, tracks and auxiliary input tracks.
Out of the box, Pro Tools 10 offers the same quantities as version 9 at However, with the addition of the Complete Production Toolkit, you now get voices up from , tracks up from , and aux input tracks up from Pro Tools HD users with an HD Core card get the same figures as with the Toolkit, except that the number of voices remains at , since this is hardware dependent — those with an HD Native card enjoy the same improvement of voices.
Those with the new Pro Tools HDX hardware get further benefits in this department, which we'll be investigating next month. The change that will have most impact is that regions are henceforth to be known as clips.
So gone is the Regions menu: in its place, the Clips menu. Likewise, the Region List is now the Clips List. Lastly, Avid have taken the opportunity to finally expel all traces of the Digidesign name from Pro Tools, including file names and paths. Fare thee well, Digidesign! While you might think it could require some effort to become aroused over Pro Tools 10 having a new disk engine, you would be wrong. All Pro Tools users will benefit from better performance when recording and playing back audio, but Pro Tools HD users and those with the Complete Production Toolkit are in for a particular treat.
In addition to support for Network and RAID storage systems, as well as enhanced support for Avid's own shared storage solutions, a new disk cache feature enables session audio files to be loaded into memory. This means that instead of the audio data being played back from disk, where it's stored, it is played back directly from memory. The advantage of playing back audio data from memory is speed. Playing back and locating different points within the session becomes perceptibly more responsive, since accessing the same data from disk will always be slower, even if you're using solid-state drives.
In fact, if all the audio in the current timeline is cached, playback and locating while playing back happens pretty much instantaneously. This will be particularly advantageous when working with large sessions, and especially useful for those running multiple Pro Tools systems in sync with each other, since the caching helps to reduce lock-up times. To enable disk caching, you simply select a size for the cache in the Playback Engine Setup window.
This size is set to 'Normal' by default, meaning that the disk playback basically works much as it did before, but you can activate disk caching by selecting an amount of memory to be used by the cache from the pop-up menu. The amount of memory available for caching will be 3GB less than the memory installed in your Mac or 4GB less on Windows, due to differences in the OS , and can be set in 1GB increments after the initial and MB options.
So if, like mine, your Mac has 16GB of memory, the maximum amount assignable for caching will be 13GB. In practice, on my Mac, which was running Mac OS Since Pro Tools 10 is a bit application, you might be wondering how it's able to access memory beyond the usual bit boundaries.
The answer is that it doesn't. Pretty neat. So if you need to free up some memory on your computer while using the disk cache, you'll need to reduce the amount of allocated memory. Once disk caching is active, the Activity section of the System Usage window will display two additional metrics: Disk Cache and Timeline Cached. The Disk Cache meter shows how much of the cache is used, while Timeline Cached indicates how much of the audio in the current Timeline is stored in the cache.
In an ideal world, the Timeline Cached value should be percent, and the Disk Cache a little lower; but you will still see benefits even if you don't have enough memory to accommodate an entire session in the cache. However, I think most people will be surprised by how little memory you actually need to store an entire Timeline in the cache.
For example, the demo song supplied with Pro Tools 10 uses only four percent of a 12GB cache. A small improvement when setting up the disk cache would be if Pro Tools could tell you how much memory would be required to cache the current Timeline in the Playback Engine window. Even though it's a global setting, rather than session-specific, it would still be helpful, since Pro Tools only allows one session to be loaded at a time anyway. Overall, though, disk caching is a brilliantly obvious way to improve the performance of audio playback in Pro Tools.
We tend to forget that in the early days of audio software, the only reason for recording directly to disk was because computers didn't have the memory capacity to store enough audio to be useful. When Pro Tools was released in , for example, a Quadra typically shipped with 4MB memory — enough for less than one minute of mono, CD-quality audio.
But with modern systems having between 4GB and 64 GB of memory, redressing the balance between memory and disk usage seems like a sensible way forward. Another apparently humble feature that may nevertheless have users reaching for the Champagne is that you can now change the gain of individual regions — sorry, I mean clips — without having to resort to automation, which is tremendously useful. By making the Clip Gain Info visible, the gain of a clip can be adjusted with a click on the fader icon that appears in the bottom left of a clip.
As you adjust the gain from the default 0dB, a handy decibel label appears next to the fader icon, reporting the gain change that's been non-destructively applied. Better still, right-clicking the fader icon provides a series of related options, where you can clear or bypass the clip gain, or even render it to an audio file.
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