Mbox pro11/12/2023 Now, the following isn’t based on any inside knowledge, but let me speculate. It’s interesting that Avid interfaces were now really worth using, concurrent with Avid not requiring that you use them any more. The irony, though, is Avid also introduced a series of interfaces in 2010 that were light-years beyond previous designs, boasting excellent audio specs and clever functionality. They have incredible enthusiasm for what they’re doing, and even when they go out on a limb-like they did with the Eleven Rack-they’ve had a string of successes.īut the bombshells kept coming in 2010, culminating in the announcement at the 2010 AES that Pro Tools 9 would no longer require Avid hardware, and would work with any ASIO interface (which is does in my experience, as long as the buffer time is a multiple of 64 samples). During the course of trade shows and such I’ve met a lot of the people driving Avid’s audio efforts, and not only are they all hardcore musicians, you would never, ever mistake them for Goldman-Sachs executives. There’s no question that at Avid’s audio division, the inmates run the asylum. Nothing turned out to be further from the truth. When Digidesign became absorbed by the Avid borg, there were fears that the days of Pro Tools were over, it would become a corporate program for doing audio-for-video, and development would stagnate. One of my guaranteed laugh lines at seminars was when someone would ask about mic pres, and my answer would be “Well, within a given price range, they’ve all reached a certain level of parity. But there was still the Achilles Heel of being a closed system: you had to use Digidesign interfaces, which lagged behind the competition in terms of audio quality and were often derided by non-Pro Tools fans as “the world’s biggest, most expensive dongle.” Sure, there were budget interfaces, like the original Mbox-but while decent, it too was simply not up to the competition. When Pro Tools 8 arrived, I found myself using it more and more, particularly when engineering classical music sessions at Maricam Studios. And the Windows version, which often seemed like an afterthought compared to the Mac version, became accepted as an equal. The user interface became increasingly streamlined with each release, and new features-some novel, some designed to play catch-up-kept being introduced. The MIDI implementation, which could charitably have been called basic, pursued an increasingly sophisticated path. Elastic Audio let groove fans do the same sort of tricks that Ableton Live, Acid, and Sonar had done for years, but although Digidesign was late to the party, their implementation was stellar. to get access to some great virtual instruments, including the outstanding (for traditionalists) Velvet electronic piano and the outstanding (for beatmeisters) Transfuser, which was also the subject of a Pro Review. Then around the time of Pro Tools 5 and 6, things started to change and accelerated further with the introduction of Pro Tools 7. But, it was about recording, not composition or remixing, and I found other programs that filled my particular needs better. In fact, for those transitioning from tape to computers, my #1 recommendation was always Pro Tools. I was never a huge Pro Tools fan yes, I got started in multitrack hard disk recording with Pro Tools back when it was about getting four tracks out of a Mac NuBus card, but over the years, Pro Tools seemed content to provide an excellent, obvious emulation of a multitrack tape-based studio. But first, we need to set the stage.įew companies have made such a concerted effort recently not to rest on their laurels as Avid (née Digidesign). Hey wait – isn’t this about Avid? Yes, indeed it is. By diversifying, they managed not only survive, but grow into new areas. For example, if you think SSL just makes big consoles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, you haven’t been paying attention: they’ve expanded out from that original charter with smaller controllers, software, signal processing, preamps, and the like. Some companies adapt and change, survive, and ultimately, thrive.
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