Pro Tools?

[PhantomLord]

i've heard people refer to Pro Tool's as the "industry standard" when it comes to recording and editing, mixing and mastering, whatever, on the computer. what makes it so great? i mean i have ACID 5 Pro and i find it very good, however, not many people use it i have noticed. what does Pro Tools have that all the others don't?

[Slipstream]

The software is like most others that have all the bells and whistles, but what makes it common to professional studios is the hardware that it is made for. Some of the big ticket studio equipment ($20,000 mixers and stuff) is what the software is made for. Digidesign (http://www.digidesign.com/products/) is who makes the stuff. The cheapest thing they make is the M-box, and it's $500 or so.

There are many other software programs that are used in pro studios though. Samplitude is one, that's about $700 I think. Does everything you can think of and then some.

[PhantomLord]

so you're saying you have to have a digidesign piece of equipment to be able to use pro tools properly?

[PhantomLord]

bump

[Barnwood]

Protools responds to Digitech equipment exclusively. I purchased the Mbox a while back and have been very pleased. I can record two tracks simultaneously and can layer over 128 tracks into one song. Digitech makes hardware that will record more tracks simultaneously but it was a bit out of my price range.

One of the selling points for me was mastering. Although I don't have the skills myself, if I had an album I was proud of, I can give it to a studio to have it mastered. Because it is done in Pro Tools they can easily do what needs to be done. (the advantage of using an industry standard)

[Slipstream]

I've never used Pro Tools, so I couldn't remark on what it can't do, but I know that 16 bit 44.1 hz WAV files can be mastered by any competent Mastering Engineer. If you do the capture with Digitech gear and use Pro Tools to do it, then it would be handy to have Pro Tools to do the mixing, although it isn't absolutely necessary.

Remember, there are three main steps. Capture, mixing, and mastering. I have two projects going right now where I'm doing the mastering on one, and all three steps on the other. The one I'm mastering was captured on a two channel tape recorder, so no mixing is possible. It was emailed to me as a single WAV file. I have done some noise reduction on the whole recording, then broke it down into tracks (each song being a separate stereo track). On the other I did the capture with Cubase LE (Presonus Firebox four channel firewire audio interface). I tried using Cubase for the mixing, but it has issues with my output sound card, so I switched to n-Track (n-Track likes my sound card), and tried to import the four channels to Audacity (it works!).

The thing is, after the capture, if you have more than two channels to mix down, you can use just about any multi-channel audio editing software, as long as you can save-as or export WAV files for the mastering step.

[Reverend40oz]

I have a fairly decent PC recording solution, but I seriously lack in any kind of recording training. What exactly are you doing when you're mastering a track? I can mix most things besides vocals pretty well, but I certainly don't have a shiny, mastered product at the end :)

[Slipstream]

Tracking is getting the material recorded, mixing is taking the tracks and mixing them down into the final stereo or 5.1 or nowadays, 7.1 surround sound file. Mastering is taking the final mix and selecting the sequence of tunes, and the overall package. The mixing stage is where the effects (such as reverb) are usually added, although the mastering engineer will probably add compression (reduction of the dynamic range), and EQ.

[Grim]

Update on ProTools versions available -

I recently purchased the ProTool M-Powered version that became available last April. Purchased through Musician's Friend (http://www.musiciansfriend.com/srs7/g=home/search/detail/base_pid/703617/). This allows you M-Audio hardware for recording. I am using the Audiophile 192 card for I/O on this particular system. What's cool is the support for ReWire, so I can create all my percussion and synth tracks in Reason 3.0, then slave Reason to a ProTools track.

Yes, Virginia, there is a ProTools for you...

[ValveTronix]

so you're saying you have to have a digidesign piece of equipment to be able to use pro tools properly?

xactly

[PhantomLord]

yeah i realised that after i installed it and it wouldn't let me use it! damn thing.