Pro Tools First in Education setting

[Boombatty]

Hi all,

I'm a high school Comm. Tech. teacher that has been using MBox2s and Windows 7 for the last few years. Unfortunately, our Adobe subscription required us to upgrade to Windows 10, leaving the MBox2s as paperweights.

We've been trying out Pro Tools First 2019.6 and have run into so many issues that I'm considering giving up and using Adobe Audition (which I really don't want to do).

We're running Active Directory and students cannot be logged in as Admins. Pro Tools First has to be run as an admin or audio won't play back (AAE Error 6 I believe). As a workaround, our tech created a script that puts in an admin password as it opens to work around this. That leads to Pro Tools seeing the Admin files and folders when saving/bouncing, etc. instead of their own files.

There are also numerous hangs on opening or creating a project or opening an existing project shows nothing. And to top it off (and I am well aware that this could be causing many of the performance issues) our computers are underpowered and under-RAMmed (is that a word?). It's also hard to pinpoint each issue in a computer lab of 27 when you don't witness everything the student did beforehand.

So... anyone out there in a similar position or have any advice on these issues other than upgrade the lab or switch to Mac (would love to do both!)?

Thanks,
Matt

[Darryl Ramm]

I would have stuck with Adobe Audition. Having the interface drive what you do here is kinda backwards. Sounds like time to replace those. Focusrite and Presonus offer nice low-cost hardware.

Pro Tools First is a mess. And you have not even mentioned it’s cloud project storage yet. If of course you want to expose students to Pro Tools that is great... but I would tackle that as a whole separate shift to Pro Tools standard, upgraded computers and hopefully educational pricing from Avid,

[Boombatty]

Thanks Darryl.

Yeah, we've purchased 3 Focusrite Scarlett Solos to start but the budget isn't big enough to get the paid version this year (we looked into Edu multi-seat licensing), nor is it big enough to replace the computer lab.

There's a checkbox to not backup to the cloud anymore on 2019.6 that seemed to work on my computer when demoing.

Even with the paid version, however, we would be running into the same Admin user problems and that's what I really need a solution for at the moment.