The software itself has also undergone radical overhauls in that time, yet unlike some DAWs, Pro Tools has managed to retain the core simplicity and elegance of its twowindow approach. Its strengths in audio recording, mixing and editing have been enhanced, while Avid have worked hard to make it competitive in areas such as MIDI sequencing, where it was previously less able than rival DAWs. The last major update, to Pro Tools 8, thus introduced a huge number of improvements focusing on the ‘music creation’ side of things. These have, no doubt, helped to make the program more appealing to newcomers, but above all, it’s the dominance of Pro Tools in professional recording and mixing circles that has fuelled its desirability further down the ladder.
The problem is that this desirability has, until now, been tempered by a fair number of frustrations. By version 8, the Pro Tools native range had become fragmented and confusing, with separate LE and MPowered versions augmented by numerous addon Toolkits, and some of the features that Avid kept HDonly were almost universal in rival DAWs. The restriction of having to use Avid’s own hardware was also becoming acute.
Enter a new management regime at Avid and a shift from ‘engineering led’ to ‘customer focused’ development. At recent industry events, Avid have been keen to emphasise that the opening up of Pro Tools 9 is not a reluctant move, but one that reflects a sea change in corporate culture. (This, apparently, has involved a shift to an ‘agile development’ model, in which their engineers become ‘pigs’ or ‘chickens’ and are divided into ‘scrum teams’. No, me neither.) The development of Pro Tools 9 was thus driven by a public wish-list that Avid have posted and maintained at http://protools.ideascale.com. Among the most indemand features were delay compensation, ASIO and Core Audio support, HD features on laptops, and higher input and track counts in native systems — and so that’s what we’ve got.
For Pro Tools LE users, it all sounds a bit too good to be true. After all, Avid were the company who used to demand an extra 20 dollars just so we could bounce an MP3 file. Surely there would be some catch, some hidden limitation that would ensure thirdparty hardware and native operation remained the poor relations?