Thread: PT 10.1.2

You guys are talking like it's necessary to buy a new car every year. We now have commercial companies that will fly into space without NASA's help. Does that mean we should utilize their services to go from New York to California? What is necessary? That's the question. 64-bit floating-point? What will this do to improve recorded sound? I'm still waiting for a real practical usable true digital microphone. I was at MIX Nashville (I'm still in Nashville) and was speaking to Neumann/Sennheiser. They actually do have a true digital microphone much like I conceived 10 years ago. They said their problem was noise. They said it was not usable for audio purposes but for scientific and industrial measurement purposes. And I still don't like PCM recording. It's segmented and I can hear that/perceive that. It's the analogy to fluorescent lighting which looks continuous but is not. Our eyes generally perceive it as a continuous flow of light. But some of our brains actually perceive the 60/50 Hz flutter. I can't stand that. I can't work under that. It drives me crazy as if I am not crazy enough already. Of course there are fools born every second. Or maybe even every 44,100 times per second and even faster. That's way too foolish for me. 5000+ DB of dynamic range processing would be analogous to everyone owning Lamborghinis and driving at 200+ miles per hour on the highways. It's a cool thought but where is the practicality? Of course technology marches on and is continuous. But computers as compared to electrons will never be fast enough until we get analog computers moving at the speed of light. So maybe we should wait on our purchases for another 100 years or so?

Beam me up Scotty
Mx. Remy Ann David

Originally Posted by BobRogers

I'm thinking that the big shakeout will come with PT11 and 64 bit. Everything they have been doing for the past ten months seems like bridges and band-aids. They are trying to prepare their legacy customers for a big change - a break from the past. My guess is that it is a matter of months. The rollouts of PT9 and PT10 don't give me a lot of confidence, but if PT11 comes out relatively error free I'll probably pay up and walk away happy. (Like Hueseph, my situation is complicated by the fact that I've invested in UAD. I'm assuming that UA and Avid will roll out 64 bit more or less simultaneously. I've not had the DAE errors with UAD and PT10 that Hueseph has had - knock wood,)

Bob or others,

Do you think Avid is working with UA or threatened by their popularity?

Remy, for me at least, its not a matter of getting the latest thing, its a matter of having the standard DAWs in my studio for importing purposes. But, if PT actually worked for me in a hybrid set-up, I may consider using it. Its been 8 years since I produced a song on PT. I don't miss it one bit but I'm always ready to merge the direction that helps me.

IMO, its the plug-ins that are the money makers, not the DAW or hardware. But the hardware is what really locks the user in so they are committed to continue supporting the plug-ins they make. I would love to be a fly on the wall when UA is being discussed.

Originally Posted by RemyRAD

You guys are talking like it's necessary to buy a new car every year...

It may sound like that, But I basically agree with what you are saying. I've skipped several generations of PT upgrades - and really TRY to upgrade only when it makes a difference in the way I do business. PT9 freed me from Digi hardware. PT10 was a closer thing. I did it for the ADC extension.

As far as PT11 goes, we will see. I'm hoping (but not really expecting) that they've taken the opportunity to create a more stable program. They enjoy the advantage of having been first in the market, but that means the code has been tweaked, added to, and modified forever to be all things to all people. Right now it's clearly a bit of a hairball. Every upgrade gets off to a bumpy start. They've taken their time to release 64 bits, but maybe that means they are doing it right and having someone go over all those nasty bits of undocumented crap that the programmer who left two years ago wrote. (Maybe those things don't happen at Avid, but their software act like they happen.)

Originally Posted by bigtree

Do you think Avid is working with UA or threatened by their popularity?

I have no real feel for this. On the surface they seem to be working together. I'm not sure that Avid is hoping to bet its future on the low-end hardware market or the plugin market. I think in the past the hardware has been basically dongles for the software. Seems that now they think the iLok is a sufficient dongle.

If our computers where fast and efficient enough to all be utilizing 1 bit, DSD, I'd be in happy land. And I'm not talking about anything converted from PCM but originating as single bit DSD. THAT is the closest digital I have heard to analog. That Korg device has virtually vanished from the face of the planet. One of the reasons for that I believe is that the software is completely impractical, expensive and lacks the effects support that everybody wants. Even SA CD's have vanished. To me, PCM is like recording a master mix down for your client on a roll of already used spliced up tape. That's almost as funny as trying to save your client money on their 2 inch analog tape by running the machine at 7.5 IPS. LOL, something Billy Mueller did at Flite Three when they first hired him on after having been only a PA guy. I once goofed around with my Ampex MM 1200 with an oscillator to get it to run at 60 IPS. A roll of 2 inch was good enough for a single song of short duration LMAO. And with that, you really didn't need any NAB/CCIR/AES pre-emphasis/de-emphasis. Though of course I did not bother to modify the EQ cards for that joke purpose. I really wigged the band out when they thought they were going to get 1/2 hour per roll. It was really rather thin sounding since the head bump moved up to 120 Hz. LOL

Everybody knows I'm a smartass
Mx. Remy Ann David

The problem with Pro Tools is instead of revising the engine, they just try and patch it. I sincerely hope that PT11 will put an end to this. They really need to do a rewrite. Just start from scratch because the old engine is faulty. I know they told us that 9 was a complete rewrite but it seems as though, it's still based on the old software. To say that it's because PT is trying to please everyone isn't really seeing the forest for the trees either. Cubase, Live, Reaper, these guys are all multi platform and seem to have stability under control for the most part. Sonar is Windows only but supports a plethora of hardware and seems to be very stable. Well, it has been very stable for me.

As far as UAD and Pro Tools are concerned, I think they were good and buddy buddy up until Apollo was announced. If you remember the Avid video, this one:

it seems like Avid were showing off what they might have felt to be a breakthrough device. If there was no contract that prevented UA from releasing the Apollo, they must have seriously ruffled some feathers. That was supposed to be Avid's leading edge. An HD box that was self contained with built in DSP.

If Avid makes that available. I don't know. I might be willing to invest in it. As it is, PT9 is a dog anytime I use a UA plug. I can use them if I increase my buffers to 1024. That's ok. I can do that but it only works for a while then I get errors. I try not to use the UA plugins in PT unless I feel it is the absolute best tool and not using it will make or break the track. Other than that, I'm happy to use Sonar. It works well. It's still a bit more cumbersome to use but I can do it and hey, the results are pretty nice.

Anyway, enough of my bellyaching.

Ya, I think the Apollo is the game changer. That thing is ideal for 98% of the DAW crowd. The last 2% is where high end sits. Apollo is the missing parts of Pro Tools. If I was staying ITB, I would be all over the Apollo simply because you can use it going in and ITB.

I'm still not looking forward to PT11 at all. I'm happy with 10.2.0. The next step IMO is not Avid's. it is the 3rd party people's. It doesn't matter if 11 is available tomorrow, it is free, it is 100% bug free, & 64 bits.....I can't use it until the third party guys port the plugins to AAX. I'm really talking about Waves & antares here. Both have said they are going to but haven't set a date. I'm not sure how Apollo fits into this.....I guess I need to research it a bit. Does it work AAX style now, is it just AAX ready, or is that a irrelevant question?