Avid Pro Tools 9 review

Ben Pitt Read more January 27, 2011

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£478

Price when reviewed

Avid claims that Pro Tools is the most widely used audio production system in the industry. Depending on your definition of industry, we’d go along with that. While Cubase and Logic dominate in home and project studios, Pro Tools is established as the de facto standard in commercial studios. That’s down to the hardware-plus-software approach taken by its (Mac-only) Pro Tools HD system in the main, with DSP chips on PCI Express cards handling audio processing, and audio interfacing limited to certain Avid-branded hardware.

Avid’s cut-price alternatives are Pro Tools LE and Pro Tools M-Powered. These run on Windows as well as Mac OS, and are bundled with various audio interfaces aimed at home and project studios. Still, limitations mean they aren’t up to the demands of serious use.

Pro Tools LE projects are limited to 48 tracks and 32 internal mix busses – plenty for most projects, but not all. The prospect of having to spend £10,000 on a Mac and Pro Tools HD system to overcome these limitations isn’t particularly tempting.

Just as serious is the lack of plugin delay compensation, which means the latency introduced by plugins results in small timing errors. Another limitation we’ve never much liked is that other brands of audio interface can’t be used – the hardware effectively acts as a copy-protection device.

Pro Tools 9 addresses all these concerns. It runs on Mac OS X and Windows 7 and replaces Pro Tools LE. However, it’s closer to Pro Tools HD with up to 96 audio tracks (at 48kHz; fewer at higher sample rates) and 64 instrument tracks per project, plus plugin delay compensation. It’s no longer tied to Avid (or its subsidiaries, Digidesign and M-Audio) hardware, with support for virtually any audio interface via the ASIO and Core Audio standards.

These improvements mean Pro Tools on the PC is now ready to be taken seriously. Even so, in some respects, it still lags behind its main competitors, Cubase, Sonar and Logic. These applications’ track counts are limited only by hardware resources, and they all support surround mixing where Pro Tools 9 is stereo only. They also have more sophisticated mix automation facilities, particularly when used in conjunction with hardware control surfaces.

Cubase and Sonar are available as 64-bit applications, where Pro Tools 9 is 32-bit, which means it will never be able to address more than 4GB of RAM. With virtual instruments drawing on vast sample libraries, it isn’t unusual to hit this limit when using lots of instrument plugins. In our tests, this caused Pro Tools to crash, repeatedly.

Windows users who want the full-fat Pro Tools experience will need to add the Complete Production Toolkit 2, which costs £1,191 exc VAT. That’s a serious price hike, but take some comfort in the knowledge that you’re getting virtually all the features of Pro Tools HD but without the hardware costs. The only significant difference is that TDM plugins can’t be used, as they’re written for Avid’s DSP chips. There are still track-count limits, but 192 audio tracks (at 48kHz) and 128 instrument tracks are likely to exceed the limitations of the host computer. It’s still 32-bit only.

Installation was unusually tricky. The software insisted on uninstalling a previous version of Pro Tools, disabled our antivirus software, rebooted twice, and left us to our own devices to get the iLok USB dongle installed and licences transferred – a convoluted process.

After that bad start, using Pro Tools 9 was pleasantly straightforward. The interface is both cosmetically and functionally very similar to Cubase, Sonar and Logic, and we were surprised at how quickly we were able to get up to speed. As with all of these applications, Pro Tools has its own terminology and idiosyncrasies, but it has a methodical approach that, more than any other music-production software, lends itself to efficient use.

Signal routing in the mixer couldn’t be more flexible, and the various channel types follow a coherent design. Some features, such as clearing all muted and soloed tracks with a single click, viewing multiple plugin editors or bypassing plugins directly on the mixer, require Ctrl-click or Alt-click commands, which aren’t as intuitive, but it becomes extremely quick with experience.

The quality of the bundled plugins is excellent, with familiar controls, classy sound quality, and a few unexpected treats such as an emulation of the classic Urei 1176 compressor. There’s no convolution-based reverb or any kind of pitch-correction plugin or editor, though. There’s an arbitrary limit of ten insert plugins per channel, although that’s better than Cubase’s eight. Bundled virtual instruments include a serviceable grand piano, a charismatic Hammond organ and a gritty analogue synth. If you want more, the Instrument Expansion Pack takes things into a different league.

A price of £398 exc VAT is a breakthrough for a grown-up version of Pro Tools, but it gets better. It costs just £149 to upgrade from Pro Tools LE, which is included with Digidesign hardware starting at just £110 (details here). Add £32 for the Pace iLok 2 dongle (as it isn’t included in the upgrade box) and Pro Tools 9, plus a basic audio interface comes to just £291 (£349 inc VAT). That makes it a lower-cost alternative to our favourite recording application, Cubase 5.

Where there are differences, most lie in Cubase’s favour. Its support for VST plugins means there are more available – particularly cheap and free ones – and 64-bit support means it can accommodate more of them in a project. Pro Tools doesn’t have as many ancillary features built in, with nothing to match Cubase 5’s sophisticated pitch-correction facilities, for example. The recently announced Cubase 6 has some tempting new features of its own too.

Cubase also demonstrates a maturity that Pro Tools can’t match, on Windows at least. Pro Tools was rock-solid (aside from the plugin memory issues), but it wouldn’t launch unless an ASIO audio interface was connected, which is a pain if all you want to do is check a file. It insisted on restarting after we changed the latency of the ASIO driver, which made fine-tuning performance against latency time-consuming, and its Help files aren’t compatible with Chrome.

However, file compatibility with professional studios may be enough to outweigh all of these small disadvantages. Musicians can bring home projects into the studio’s familiar recording environment, and for smaller commercial studios there’s a cachet in being able to offer Pro Tools to clients that rival software can’t quite match. Coupled with its surprisingly low price, that’s likely to be more than enough to persuade many to invest.