Tag Archives: protools

News

What Is Up With Avid?

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Protoolerblog posted this yesterday:

“If you’re a Avid stockholder you might just freak out a bit right now: the company has postponed earnings from last quarter of 2012 and is now under investigation by at least two law firms.”

Avid makes ProTools….and they used to own M-Audio until they sold it this past summer. They also own Sibelius….after they fired the core developer group. Sorta a BIG deal when this company has two big industry leading (ProTools) or at least industry tying (Sibelius) pieces of software.
The Boston Herald has more:

“The digital audio and video technology maker said the company needs additional time “to evaluate its current and historical accounting treatment related to bug fixes, upgrades and enhancements to certain products which the company has provided to certain customers.”

Now, is this bad news? Probably……www.investopedia.com answer on why companies delay earnings doesn’t sound good:

“However, most often, the delay will be a result of the company not completing the report on time due to audits taking longer than expected, inexperienced officers completing their first report and the firm losing some or all of its financial data due to a technical error, fire or theft.”

Ok, no fire, or theft. Inexperienced Officers? Perhaps. Losing it’s financial data? Probably not. So…..it is probably them trying to polish a turd. Meaning Avid’s sales sucked last year, that users are still baulking at the price of ProTools 10 and it’s upgrade price from previous versions. That selling M-Audio didn’t do much for the company, and in fact might have hurt them more.

I guess we will know in 45 days or so the exact financials, but I don’t expect it to be good at all. May I suggest all you who use ProTools consider learning other programs just in case (like Logic!)

Articles

How Much Longer Will ProTools Be Around?

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From Wall Street PR:

Avid Technology is a company specializing in video and audio production technology, specifically digital non-linear editing (NLE) systems, management and distribution services. While Emmy and Oscar winners and nominees almost invariably use the company’s systems, sales seem to be a problem that Avid can’t cut out of the picture.

Avid now envisions revenue of $125 million to $127 million, and a GAAP loss of $17 million to $19 million. Previous Street consensus was for revenue of $145.2 million and a profit of 14 cents a share. This announcement shocked investors in early trading hours, as this Q3 revenue range included $4 million of revenue from divested businesses, while ongoing businesses had revenue of $121 million to $123 million versus $143 million a year ago.

Basically, Avid, you screwed yourself by continuing to sell ProTools for too much. And, you waited way to long to allow ProTools to work on NON Avid hardware. Thus, you pretty much shut yourself out of the prosumer/consumer market. People can by Reason, Logic, Ableton, Sonar, Reaper, Digital Performer, and a host of other programs for a fraction of what you want for ProTools. And existing users……you want $499 for me to upgrade? Forgetaboutit!

Articles

Avid Sells Off Most Of Its Product Lines/MakeMusic in the Tank as well.

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So, this was making the rounds a couple of weeks ago.

Avid has agreed to sell its consumer audio and video product lines. The company’s consumer audio products are being sold to inMusic, the parent company of Akai Professional, Alesis and Numark, among others.

Basically, Avid is in trouble. It hasn’t made any headway in the consumer or prosumer markets. Why? Look at the ridiculous prices it charges for upgrades or for a first time ProTools. $699 for a first time purchase, $299 for users of ProTools 9, and previous versions of ProTools it’s $399. Logic 9 is $199. Does what ProTools does. M-Audio hardware also, for years, suffered stupid limitations. For years they had a Pro-Tools M-Powered that would only run on M-Audio hardware, but the LE version would run on Digidesign hardware, but if you had both hardware, you had to have two versions of ProTools to use them, and you couldn’t use them together. Companies like MOTU didn’t have this problem, you could use many of their interfaces together in Digital Performer. No problem. MOTU still makes interfaces that consistently win awards. M-Audio or Avid? No so much.

Avid should have dropped the price for ProTools to $299 for new purchases of ProTools 10. Sure, make the HD version a little more expensive, but not much more. But $699? Digital Performer is $499. Maybe that would be a better comparison for entry price. Avid made some steps forward by NOT requiring ProTools to have to use certain hardware, but the price seems to be the barrier right now. I know more guys using Logic 9 now than ProTools simply because you can get it for $199 in the App Store and it just works. Simple, cheap, and produces stuff that sounds great.

Avid is also supposedly gutting the whole Sibelius team as well. I hear rumors that the London offices are being closed. Sibelius is a property that Avid is keeping, not selling. Not sure what this means for the future of Sibelius. They used to be a company that was just up the street in Walnut Creek California. Now…..who knows.

AND……now MakeMusic (makers of Finale and SmartMusic) is having issues. Someone wants to buy them out. There is a good article about possible reasons and stuff here.

For me, I think MakeMusic needs to do two things right now. It needs an iPad version of SmartMusic. And it needs to allow printing of music from SmartMusic. The first point is self explanatory. Let me elaborate on the second.

Printing music from SmartMusic. It is something that they haven’t allowed at all. They used to allow printing of public domain or the stuff people generated from SmartMusic. But the last few versions I believe they removed that. SmartMusic is not only a great practice tool, but also a publishing tool. What other thing on the net would allow you to hear, and SEE every part of a piece you wanted to buy for your band? There isn’t. SmartMusic could be enabled to allow the purchase of music and the subsequent printing of the music. So, if the band director wanted his band to play “Childrens March” and have them work on it with SmartMusic, the process would be simple. Band teacher loads up SmartMusic, finds the version of the song he likes, buys it, prints it, done. The printing I think should be UNLIMITED but they should have some sort of tag or code on the page to know who’s printed version this is. Something like a school code or director id or something on every page. Most online printing services, like MusicNotes.com, allow TWO prints per purchase. That is stupid. For a band teacher, you’d need unlimited prints. Kids lose stuff, damage stuff, etc. Plus, SmartMusic could now be a digital LOCKER for the music. Teachers wouldn’t have to store scores anymore.

Heck, you could go even so far as say the director has 20 songs that are in SmartMusic. But they don’t want to repurchase all of them. What should they do? MakeMusic would have a program for say $10 per piece you could send the score and parts BACK to MakeMusic, they would verify you own the piece, then they would give you access to the piece on SmartMusic. And then they would either recycle the paper or send it back. Or maybe they could verify it via purchase orders. I dunno. Something.

The additional angle on this is that somewhere in the future, classrooms are going to be paperless. Or mostly paperless. MakeMusic could tout that they are future proofing music programs. I think this would make a lot of sense, and is do-able in the next year…..depending on the publishers.

Interesting times. I don’t know what the future holds, but MakeMusic and Avid have a lot of work to do to remain viable products.

Articles, Reviews

Ditching Pro Tools For Logic

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For various reasons, I decided NOT to upgrade my ProTools to the new version. I won a system in 2007 that included a copy of ProTools M-Powered version 7. I upgraded to 8 as well, and mixed a big band album with the gear. I thought about moving to 9, but the upgrade costs were huge. Plus, I had also, in 2007, bought Logic 8 when Steve Jobs issued $200 credits to the first buyers of iPhones (love you Steve!).

Anyhow, when Mac OS X 10.7 Lion came out, the fate of ProTools for me was sealed. Version 8 didn’t run on it. But Logic ran on it. And for $199 I could buy Logic 9 from the App Store. And I did. And I haven’t looked back.

Is there something I miss about ProTools? I think the flow of working with audio is a little better, and the tools are incredibly cool. That is not to say that Logic doesn’t have these tools, but like to put in a Fade in ProTools vs Logic, it seems to be more precise in ProTools. I do miss my McDSP plugins though. I had bought them when they were RTAS, and I do miss them. Especially some of the compressors. Oh well. Oh, and Altiverb 6 sorta works in Logic in 64bit mode but shows up as unsupported. Strange.

I DO however, love the Exporting out of Logic. You don’t have to play the whole thing back. You bounce it, and boom. It is done in mere seconds. Logic also has a wealth of built in plugins.

If you use a Mac, and are sick of ProTools reaming you for upgrades, get Logic.

Articles

Mixing a Big Band CD – Part 1

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Back in August of 2007 and January of 2008, a Big Band that I play in recorded two live performances for a “Demo CD”. Well, in the 2 some years since we made the two recordings, the project has become a full-blown album that is currently playing on Jazz Radio stations and available on the iTunes store. This is the multipart story of how I mixed 8 of the 17 songs on the CD.

The original idea was that we wanted more gigs, and that a lot of people wanted to hear the band before booking it, so we needed a “Demo CD”. At the time we had live recordings that I was making using my Rode NT 4, but a lot of them suffered from crowd noise, wind noise, etc. We wanted something a little bit better. So, we hired someone to do a live recording of the band. Each person individually mic’d, etc, etc. The first concert was in August of 2007, part of a Jazz thing the area puts on (though I don’t think they did it this year…..darn economy). It was held at the Blackhawk Auto Museum.

If you have been to the museum, or look at the pictures…..it is a recording person’s nightmare. Marble floors, surfaces where things bounce off of (cars, pillars, people), plus crowd noise. The crowd was there for a night of socializing and stuff, and as the evening went on, the noise became louder and louder (more on that in later). Anyhow, we had the concert, I made a live recording using my gear, and listened to it. Lots of noise, people talking, eating, dropping glasses, etc. Lots of reverb from the room (more like a Batcave to me).

The mix engineer pretty much decided that the session wasn’t going to yield a lot of material. I think he looked at 3 tracks or so. The project pretty much sat in limbo until the next concert where the scene was totally different. An actual performing arts center. A quiet audience. Acoustic grand piano (the Blackhawk gig the piano player used a keyboard). Different lead alto. Different microphones. Pretty much totally the opposite of the first recording session.

In the interval between the two concerts, I won a contest. Yeah. It DOES happen to people. So, suddenly I had stuff that was like…..pro level. Stuff I didn’t now how to use (I was a Digital Performer person since…..forever). And in January of 2008, my trusty old PowerMac Quicksilver 2002 (or my hackintosh, since I upgraded it to dual processor, etc etc) died and I replaced it with a 2008 MacPro Dual Quad-Core. The stars were aligning. In I believe March of 2008 I got to go to a mixing session. I had mentioned to the engineer that I had recently come into a ProTools setup (M-Powered), and if I could maybe get the tracks to the first concert to mess around with to get my feet wet in ProTools and whatnot. He agreed, and during that session in March, I brought a portable drive with me, and he loaded up a blank session (with like 3 edits he did) that was the Blackhawk concert. Something like 18 tracks totaling over 20 gigs of data……

Part two (what I got…..what a mess!) Coming soon.

Articles

Run ProTools On Mackie Hardware? Say What???

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This summer, Mackie unveiled a new line Onyx-i firewire mixers that you could, with the purchase of a $50 driver, run Pro Tools M-Powered 8 with. You don’t need to own a M-Audio interface. It would just “work”. A lot of people thought Mackie was going to get a taste of Digidesign’s lawyer division in short order. BUT….it seems they have indeed licensed something with Digidesign, so it is now “legal” to run Pro Tools on a Mackie Onyx mixer.

So, why? And why should you care? I think the reason is that Avid (Digidesign and M-Audio’s parent company) has seen that tons of people are using other pieces of software. Logic, Sonar, Digital Performer, Cakewalk, to name but a FEW. Allowing Mackie hardware to use ProTools allows the software, which is really great IMHO, more exposure. Plus you could have a full 32 track studio happening if you bought 2 Onyx 1640i mixers. True, you don’t get the motorized faders that something like the 003 has (if you have Pro Tools LE) or the Project Mix I/O. But both of these only have 8 preamps.

Anyhow, It is great news. Mackie and Digi working together? Hmmm….

News

Digidesign Releases ProTools 7.4.2 for OS X 10.5.3

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Almost 9 months after Apple released OS X 10.5, Digidesign got around to releasing an update to Pro Tools to let people run it “officially” on 10.5. Woohoo.

I had to run Pro Tools on 10.5 due to a new Mac Pro purchase. It worked ok on the MacPro, failed miserably on my iMac. Then Apple released 10.5.3, and Digi released 7.4.2pr (pre-release), and that worked on the iMac. Looking forward to playing with it later.

Articles, Reviews

Altiverb

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I have had the pleasure the last few week to work on mixing a big band that I play in. We recorded 20 something tracks at a concert, and I was able to obtain the Pro Tools session, and set off to salvage the recording session. We recorded twice, and supposedly the second session was better, so, they have been mixing that in the studio. However, the vocalist who performs with us did way better the first session. It was a good way to get your feet wet with Pro Tools, and the whole mixing thing. I’ve always wanted to do a big project like this.

After some cutting, balancing, EQing, etc, etc, I had a fairly good mix happening, but it really lacked something. That something was a good reverb. I was using D-Verb, Pro Tools reverb. Not really all the great. Ozone 3 has a great reverb that I have been using (LOVE Ozone 3) on stuff, but it didn’t seem to do the job. What they were using in the studio was Altiverb, an amazing convolution reverb program.

I’m not going to do an in depth review of it, but what I will say is that this program made everything sound better. The right space, and the right amount made all my mixes finally work and pass the test with various band members. It adds that quality to sound that……it is not easily put into works. It’s the gel, it’s the glue, it’s the stuff. The right reverb just makes it work, and Altiverb is that sort of reverb. True, it was a lot of money, but it makes everything sound better. Even midi mockups sound more realistic now.

Highly recommended. 9.5 out of 10. .5 deducted for the use of iLok, which I’m beginning to hate.

Articles, News

No ProTools for another 1-2 Months……maybe?

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I read this disappointing bit of news in the duc.digidesign.com forums.

We hope to have the new release within between 1 and 2 months from now; some of that timetable is contingent on Apple.

It’s not the WHOLE thing they posted. Lots of hemming and hawing about why they still have not delivered ProTools on Mac OS X 10.5. Every other major audio program is running on it. Ableton, Reason, Logic and Digital Performer (The last two, well, are Mac only, so).

On my systems, ProTools M-Powered works well on my MacPro if you knock down the number of processors from 8 to 4. And the beta drivers for the Project Mix I/O work ok (a little funky at times in DP5 and Logic, fine in ProTools). On my iMac…..it is very, very unstable. Sometimes ProTools and the Fast Track Ultra work great. Sometimes, not. It is a turkey shoot there. And there are lots of playback glitches. And recording glitches. Not good.

Articles, News

SSL Pro Convert

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Announced at AES, SSL Pro Convert sounds like a very cool piece of software. Say you have a project you recorded in Digital Performer, and want to put in ProTools M-Powered. You can’t. Nope. Yeah, it sucks. It is stupid. But you simply can’t export a OMF file out of Digital Performer and open it in Protools M-Powered. So, all that stuff I won a while ago, I can’t use ProTools on projects I have in Digital Performer. In fact, most of my stuff is in Digital Performer as that is what is in my teaching studio, since you need to have M-Audio or Digidesign hardware to run Protools (in addition to a iLok USB key).

Anyhow, SSL Pro Convert seems to be a piece of software that sounds like it would overcome this problem. Not sure how much they are going to want for something like this, but it might be worth it to some people. Though, that new M-Audio interface, coupled with Protools looks real tempting.

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Pro Tools M-Powered

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I came across this yesterday. You can now get Protools if you have M-Audio‘s line of interfaces. This is totally cool. 32 Audio tracks, and it ships with 30 plugins. Wow!Downside, it’s $350. Upside, cheapest M-Audio interface is about $99. Still, for the power of the software, this is a huge value. I’d still like to see Digidesign just offer the software for sale to use with any interface. There are so many excellent interfaces out there, including Mackie, MOTU, and Tascam. I think if Digidesign knocked the price of Protools LE down to $299 and have it work with any interface, they could have something going.