

I always have wildly mixed feelings about the unveiling of a new major Pro Tools version - half kid-in-a-candy-shop excitement about new features and improvements, half stomach-sinking dread of installation bugaboos and upgrade growing pains. Let’s hear from each of them in turn, starting with Eli. Tape Op’s Assistant Gear Geek and prepress guy (and college instructor) Scott McChane pilots PT HD while working at The Hangar in Sacramento but has spent many more hours steering a Pro Tools LE system at home and in the field. Senior Contributor Allen Farmelo tracks to a PT HD rig at Mavericks in New York City and does much of his mixing at his home studio in Brooklyn on his personal PT HD setup. Eli Crews co-owns New, Improved Recording in Oakland, equipped with Pro Tools HD (as well as a 2’’ 24-track). I sold my Pro Tools HD system four years ago (Tape Op #58) and eventually settled on Nuendo (#62, #68) as the primary DAW in my personal studio, so I asked three writers who are longtime Pro Tools users to share this review with me. For the next few days, PT9 was the hottest topic on the show floor, and the majority of the vendors with whom I spoke were getting very excited about the possibilities of integrating with the newly “open” version of the most popular DAW in the world.

And from the attendees of the show, I heard an equal number of jubilant exclamations as I did sighs of relief. There were genuine smiles (and some emotional tears) from the Avid employees (many of whom I’ve never seen so excited in the years I’ve known them) who were at the press events. I was at the AES show in San Francisco when PT9 was made public. We were given a few sparse details, and there were of course rumblings on the various audio forums and blogs, but for the most part, the announcement of a hardware-agnostic Pro Tools DAW took the audio community by surprise. A couple months before the official unveiling of Pro Tools 9, Avid shared with the press that it was implementing significant changes to its customer value proposition.
