Avid Pro Tools 9
Digital Audio Workstation Software
It’s official. Hell has frozen over. This year’s AES show in San Francisco saw the announcement most of us thought we’d never hear: Avid, for so long the most insular manufacturer in the business, were embracing openness.
No longer would their marketleading Pro Tools DAW be tied to Avid’s own hardware; from now on it would work with any interface that supported the ASIO or Core Audio driver protocols, from the Apogees and Prisms of this world to the builtin inputs and outputs of a cheap laptop.
And that wasn’t all. Users of the more affordable native Pro Tools packages, LE and MPowered, had long griped about the artificial limitations that kept those packages featurepoor in comparison with Pro Tools HD. At a stroke, Pro Tools 9 removes nearly all of these — and with the addition of the new Complete Production Toolkit 2, a native system can acquire all the features of an HD rig apart from those that are hardwaredependent, making such gems as VCA groups and advanced automation available to native users for the first time.
Over the last decade or so, Digidesign and now Avid have done a remarkable job of reversing that situation, to the point where other DAWs such as Nuendo and Logic now incorporate numerous features that originated in Pro Tools. You could point to several milestones along that path.
First came Pro Tools Free, a free ‘taster’ version of the software that would work with a Mac’s builtin hardware. Then came the Digi 001, the Mbox and a succession of other affordable native versions, successful ports of the Pro Tools software to Windows and Mac OS X, and the acquisition of MAudio. Meanwhile, at the high end, there was the transition from Pro Tools Mix to Pro Tools HD, and the introduction of the hugely powerful Icon control surfaces.