Should I buy ProTools?

[Wrecked944]

The singer from my old punk band is convincing me we need to record a punk rock Christmas album. So I cranked up the audio recording section of my PC (circa 1999) and found that most of my software needs to be re-installed to conform to the hardware changes I've made over the past five years. Basically, I have Cakewalk 7.0 on there as well as an ancient midi-to-wav batch converter called WavMaker and a notation application called Noteworthy Composer. These apps were clunky but produced perfectly good results for our last recording. But since I need to re-install and reconfigure them all anyway, I figure I might as well consider replacing them with newer technology.

Sooooo...is ProTools worth the price? I have a decent sound card so I kind of think I would only need the software version. Is there something better out there? Can I use it to write drum and bass parts using regular music notation and can it convert midi files to high quality wav files?

BTW - I'm running Win2000 on a 1Ghz CPU with 1G of RAM.

[Sonic dB]

What version of Pro Tools? LE?

It is the industry Standard....so its good to learn...but LE is not exactly fully compatible with Pro Tools HD or the older TDM....

In my opinion hardware is most important. I used to be national sales manager for Aardvark Audio (now out of business, but not due to my work.)... and I use an Aardvark Q10 clocked by an AardSync II. I run Sonar on an XP system. It sounds great, studio quality really...

...but Sonar software is considered 'prosumer' in the real recording industry... if I switch to a Mac someday, I will go with Pro Tools but Sonar is better on the PC for compatibility.

What sound card are you using Janus? Pro Tools is better on the Mac. You could probably purchase an upgrade to Sonar XL (predecessor to Cakewalk) for cheaper and get better results on the PC.

[concentric]

If you don't have an M-Audio or Digidesign interface (Digi001, Digi002, M-box2), then you can't really run ProTools effectively. There are work-arounds, but they would be too time consuming to make it worthwhile.

Any software program (Cubase, Logic, Digital Performer, PT) will work for what you're trying to accomplish, but ProTools offers the flexibility to have the tracks worked on at a professional facility if you want to say, record at home and mix somewhere else. PT works fine on both Mac and PC these days, I know folks running both.

Honestly, for the money I don't think the MBox deal can be beat. ~$500 gets you the box (Focusrite Mic-Pres, Midi I/O, SPDIF I/O, a monitor path [very important]) and the software.

Honestly, the reason why ProTools is the industry standard seems arbitrary. Lots of other programs do certain things better than PT (Logic is amazing), but if you want transferability to other facilities, an easy to use UI, and a reliable platform, it works well.

I think between work and home I have access to about 15 PT systems, ranging from the bottom of the line (Digi001) to a full 192 input HD3 TDM setup with Apogee Rosetta 800s and Digi 192s, clocked by a Big Ben and synced to tape (Studer A820 analog 2", swiss precision!) or SMPTE using a Digi Sync IO... $$$$$$

If you have any questions about working with PT or anything audio related, let me know. I have world-class people engineering for me and teching our studio. They really know almost everything there is to know about audio in a studio environment.

Jason

[Sonic dB]

The reason why Pro Tools is the "standard" is because as you know they were one of the first to mass market a computer hosted hard disk system back in the mid to late 80s...money rolled in and the marketing power machine known as Digidesign was created... they were acquired by Avid and it got worse...Digi is the Microsoft of the audio industry...and will try to crush anything it their path that they do not own... I know this because they tried to crush the AardSync II, but ultimately I would just flip on an HD (or worse TDM) system and switch between the internal clock and the AardSync II...and everyone in the room or store would immediately notice the improvement that the AardSync II made.

OT.. Igor Levin, who I used to work for...creator of the AardSync II has a new line of Clocks out.. check them out at www.antelopeaudio.com The early reviews are more favourable to the Big Ben.

Plugs aside...

Jason states the absolute truth about PT compatibility with those sound cards... the MBox is a great deal as he noted.

[nostatic]

I haven't fired up PT in well over a year. I do everything in either Logic or Live. We ended up tracking in PT but I moved everything into Logic to mix and post.

But the MBox is a pretty cheap/easy way into things if you only need to record 2 tracks at a time. I'm a big Metric Halo fan though...

[concentric]

Originally posted by Sonic dB
The reason why Pro Tools is the "standard" is because as you know they were one of the first to mass market a computer hosted hard disk system back in the mid to late 80s...money rolled in and the marketing power machine known as Digidesign was created... they were acquired by Avid and it got worse...Digi is the Microsoft of the audio industry...and will try to crush anything it their path that they do not own... I know this because they tried to crush the AardSync II, but ultimately I would just flip on an HD (or worse TDM) system and switch between the internal clock and the AardSync II...and everyone in the room or store would immediately notice the improvement that the AardSync II made.

OT.. Igor Levin, who I used to work for...creator of the AardSync II has a new line of Clocks out.. check them out at www.antelopeaudio.com The early reviews are more favourable to the Big Ben.

Plugs aside...

Jason states the absolute truth about PT compatibility with those sound cards... the MBox is a great deal as he noted.

[audio rant]
All right on the mark. Don't even get me started on the floating point math those bastards use for the stereo bus.

HD is the first iteration of "professional" PT that is even close to being tolerable to my ears, but I'm a tape guy when it comes down to it. Probably for the same reasons I like my car.

The true irony of my life is that I have my clients work on a 65K PT setup in a million dollar studio while I still prefer to record at home on a Tascam cassette 8-track with an SM57.
[/audio rant]

Real content:

Don't forget that you can have the best of both worlds by also getting an M-Box: You can run either PT or Logic using this interface (this also applies to the Digi002 [not a bad unit, all in all]) and the M-Audio interfaces), so take your pick.

JCM