Avid announced Pro Tools 12 and Pro Tools First, a free version of Pro Tools at NAMM 2015. The Noise Room caught up with Marketing Director Tony Cariddi who to told us about the new products as well as the flexible licensing in Pro Tools, Avid Cloud Collaboration, and new services in the Avid Marketplace.
With Pro Tools First, artists can quickly turn ideas into professional-sounding songs by recording, using software instruments, and applying audio effects. To expand their creative toolset further, the integrated Avid App Store provides a world of affordable AAX plug-ins and “First” bundles on the Avid Marketplace that make creating, shaping, and enhancing sounds quick and easy.
Featuring new flexible licensing options, Pro Tools 12 delivers on Avid’s commitment to customer choice, a key element of Avid Everywhere™. The company also announced new innovations to support artist collaboration and content distribution with Avid Cloud Collaboration and new services in the Avid Marketplace.
For more information, please visit www.avid.com
First off, I would like to say that I am a legitimate (paid) user. I purchased my Pro Tools rig 5 years ago, (back when the Pro Tools software came free with the hardware). I paid over $2,500 for my Digi 002 Console which came with Pro Tools 7 and a large bundle of plug-ins.
That said, the hardware has always worked great, but I have had nothing but problems with the software from day one. Pro Tools is the most UNSTABLE DAW platform in existence and I have spend over 100 hours on the phone with support troubleshooting various problems.
When it became clear and apparent that Digidesign had no intention of actually fixing the bugs in Pro Tools, they gave me a “courtesy upgrade” to Pro Tools 8. It’s important to understand that by doing this, they basically admitted that their product was crap.
Now, upgrading Pro Tools is no easy task and it actually left me in a WORSE situation with missing tracks, patches, plug-ins and corrupt files ect… And of course, Pro Tools 8 was plagued with it’s own issues and Avid has since 8 for 9 and then 9 for 10 and so on.
Now, I have serious issues with the pricing and licensing system of Pro Tools because I feel like I got burned and locked out in the darkness with a defective product that never worked. I want to upgrade, it’s going to cost me a lot of money and I just can’t justify giving Avid another dollar. It would be one thing if the software would just work out of the box perfectly as it’s intended, but how do you justify $700 price tag for buggy software?
What I like about Apple computers is how well the hardware and software integrate. Apple even stopped charging for Mac OSX and all Mac users automatically get the latest updates for free. This was a brilliant move because it keeps people using Mac and that translates into marketshare. AVID did the COMPLETE OPPOSITE with Pro Tools and decided that they were in the business of selling software. BUGGY software that has plagued me and thousands of users for nearly two decades.