Ellard

Digidesign have very kindly furnished me with a copy of the just released Pro Tools LE8. (After I paid for it.) So now together we can see what ‘industry standard’ means in 2008!

It means Cubase.

To be more precise it means getting all the good bits from Cubase and shoving them into Tools. Which is not a bad thing for the end user. But let’s be systematic.

First, be assured that all the really arse bits of Tools are still there. Bouncing from track to track, mixing down in real time, RTAS, DAE … you’re not going to escape it that easy. ‘Suck it down’ as the bad guys in Duke Nukem 3D used to say. Underlying the shiny new exterior is the old business of copying stereo into mono files and matching data rate. You cannot mix up sound sources like Vegas – when Digi claim ‘mixed sources’ they only mean AIF and WAV, huge bloody woo. However stereo tracks are now counted as a single track so you can have up to 96 voices.

Suck It Down

Shiny New Exterior means it looks like Cubase, a little less black than Logic. This actually does make working more pleasant. There’s a Quick Start dialogue with templates which is rather Cakewalk and not that helpful if you’re not doing the same job that much. Could be good for sausage factories.

The Universe View sits up top and shows you a zoomed out map of your complete session. Move around a little box to pan through your time line, then wonder why the hell there is no zoom on it like you get in Ableton Live and Audition. So close Digi, yet so far.

You can see your waveforms rectified, I know you will excited by that. But tear yourself away and look here for we now have automation lanes that go with each track so you can see volume, panning, effects automation all at the same time. Grown men weep, women swoon. Why has this taken so long?

Double click on some MIDI to open the new MIDI editor, and you will not be too surprised. This kind of thing has been available in Cubase and Logic since Ug banged two rocks together – the editor is good, certainly better than the feeble offering in Live. The scoring feature likewise will please people that can play piano with two fingers at once. If you have used this in other software you’ll know the deal, no more no less.

Some instruments are supplied in RTAS format to reduce your hatred of that stupid format. Boom is a drum machine Roland style. DB33 is one of those electric organs people stopped using in 1950 something, but somehow always end up in free plug in packs. Mini Grand is a pretty damn good sampled piano. Structure free is half a ROMpler and Vacuum is a decent analogue synthesiser, without being exceptional (filter doesn’t feedback damnit). Xpand2 is another competing ROMpler… not sure what the story is there.

You get some more effects than in v7. But not Cosmonaut Voice, a real shame for fans of this legendary crap effect, who will just have to speak through toilet rolls instead. The industry standard DVerb now gets a little touch of chorus, which will hide the metallic cheap stomp box quality of this highly regarded effect.

Executive summary: if you use Pro Tools you really should get the upgrade, because they’ve got the photocopier out big time. Even Cubase owners might want this for the audio editing, plus you get to use some, er, very familiar MIDI tools. You could go for Nuendo but this is lot less expensive. Still room for Live and FL Studio in the soundscape, although they’ll probably be embraced and extinguished in the next upgrade.

If you used to use Pro Tools but got sick to death of their closed formats, real time processing and the damn DAE, this isn’t going to entice you back. The fundamental faults of Pro Tools archaic inner workings are still there. Digi isn’t about to hand over the keys to the engine room yet. But then, look what happened to Quark and the Soviet Union.