[deanrichard]

I don't use it, so for me it doesn't offer any value. My guess it that the percentage of PT users who do is very small, and the ones who pay for the service is much smaller still. But for the ones who use it, I'm sure it's useful.

Originally Posted by dr_daw

So, I've been working on a project for a few months testing the 'Collaboration' feature that was to be the 'holy grail' of PT's 12. To say the least, this is one of the biggest waste of resources I have ever been exposed to as a customer.

I run a system that, for my purposes, gives the illusion that it is bullet proof. It is this reason that I reached out to the community to try to do a project via the new feature. The first thing that became apparent is that if you intend on doing a full 'live instrument' project on what Avid provides for free...forget it! In the beginning of the trial I did all my drum takes (8 tracks) into the cloud with only a stereo stem of the mix with no drums. Three takes took up the entirety of the space provided.

To this we adapted, saving the mix or stems as a session, working on it locally until the final takes got approval (via committing the drum buss and only uploading that to the cloud). The project owner then had to purchase more space in order to upload to takes of 8 track 24/48 drums.

After thinking that we beat the system and were off to the races the next hurdle appeared. Once beginning the second song using what we learned after the first; two of the collaborators were unable to upload tracks. Full disk repairs, prefs trashes, reboots did not solve the problem. The result in order to maintain fluidity in the project was to use the FREE space available on Dropbox to transfer files (a method that I've used to complete two EP's with artists and mix engineers across the country).

This resulted in a second change to our workflow in which that only mix stems were uploaded to the cloud, they would be downloaded and saved as a session locally and worked on that way. Again feeling like we had beaten the bag of crap coding sold as a marketing scheme I've attempted to move on to the third song.

I'm now 3 hours into just simply trying to sign in and being plagued with a blank sign in screen, no connections and the like. Being a new father with a finite amount of time for recording. I value my ability to be able to record when creativity strikes; especially when I'm asked to do so by someone else on their project. They have expectations of me to deliver, and when time zones get involved the ability to troubleshoot goes out the window.

This is more of a story that I feel may not be suitable for this thread, and I'm not looking for solutions to my problem. Those of you that know me here, know that I am always open to ask for help. This is more of a statement to confirm what all of us thought...that years (maybe even next year) we'll look back at this collaboration feature and laugh! Just like we do with Mini discs, key-tars, and egg cartons for acoustic treatment.

Here are some screen shots of tonights wasted creativity! Thanks Avid! You guys are swell.