Will Avid ever add folders and why keep BS'ing about fixes that aren't there?

[TNM]

Hi.. a topic about specific disappointments and also general disillusion with Avid regarding PT.

Firstly, fixes..I am talking specifically about instrument tracks losing their midi output routing on project reload..
This still happens to me on Mojave and PT 2019.10.. almost every project reload actually.. before it happened less. Also moving clips by precise sample amount on mac.. It works on windows, why not fix it on mac? "Oh, it's in the database"! LOL!

Avid actually gave their word that track folders would be implemented in 2018.. so, in a little over 3 weeks, it will be 2020 and still nothing...

Also, PT is always the very last DAW to get the newest OS support. I did decide on a 16" macbook after all, and I did shop a ton of lappies.. but with the $400 discount apple gave me on a specced out one it worked out the same cost as a windows laptop with similar specs.That said, all these windows laptops had better GFX cards but only 1080P screens and only a 1TB SSD.. I got a 2TB, 64GB ram, 8GB 5500M and 2.4ghz 8core..and honestly, I can live with 8GB 5500M ATI graphics for gaming.. it's good *enough*.. but it does mean that my iMac is the only machine I can use PT on for the foreseeable future. (well, there's bootcamp I guess..).

They promised the 32 and 64 core audio sample buffer was fixed.. it's not.

Please don't tell me to go to another DAW. My issue is, that no matter what DAW I use, and I know them all more or less back to front, the PT workflow is very fast for me.. and it's also about the GUI.. one of the few DAW's left in the world that isn't a pitch black funeral colour, which I find impossible to work with. Let's face it, the GUI is the best bar none, there is nothing close.
The other big thing is the way clip volume is handled.. I am very surprised no one has copied it...
People that use S1 or Reaper or Cubase keep telling me "they can do it too exactly the same".. But they don't get it...

In those DAW's if you want simple vertical volume up and down control on just a small part of the clip, you need to splice the clip for each segment you want to change the volume on. Sure, there is automation, but then there's no visible waveform change.. Nothing can level a long, way out of whack clip like PT can.

Every time I explain to them that in PT you just highlight the part you want within a clip and then drag up or down.. it doesn't seem to register that Reaper and S1 can't do that.. Cubase has a volume ramp on the clip but it has no vertical control.. it's just dots you place for up and down *ramps* and it's super cumbersome to use and just horrible quite frankly.. therefore, like all other DAWs, it comes down to splicing and then getting the individual gain handles.

But it is annoying me, genuinely annoying me, that I am paying for support, and none of the bugs I have personally reported in almost 4 years have been fixed (the alt H move by samples bug on mac, the low latency core audio bug on mac, the reload project midi outputs disconnected bug), and the one promise I REALLY wanted that they have made, the folders, was not even implemented!

My only other choice is Logic on a Mac, as S1's performance is abysmal.. I mean, it's really, really bad.. You can't even arm one VI, yes one, when there is a moderate, say 16 track project playing back, using the so called dropout protection, and play in some more midi.. even at 128 buffer it goes berzerk and scratches and pops like crazy.. Confirmed now even by quantum users on the S1 forum...
DP and Reaper are for Rocket scientists that love complicated workflow.

Bitwig is just bit****.. Ableton still has crappy ADC and no visual compensation 20 years later...

Again, Logic is the only alternative, but no automaton ADC drives me crazy.. that was the entire, single reason I left Logic after almost 2 decades to begin with, and nothing has changed in 10.4.7.
Plus, I use ReVoice a LOT, Logic's ARA is broken and transfers must be done in realtime. PT might not have ARA but i can do almost instantaneous transfers to and from Synchroarts plugins.

Anyway..
Am I being unreasonable, as a customer, with what I am asking? The price has now gone to double to keep my perpetual license up to date, and is it WRONG to expect something for that?
What have they *really* done to the program in the last TWO years besides the track presets and search engine? Anything else?
And the support I pay for just tells me things will be fixed or in the database, yet nothing ever happens.

Why do you think Avid are so stubborn to put the radius algorithm setting back to where it was pre 2008 so it doesn't smush transients? Since radius actually has a transient setting built in, I know for a fact they just have to put a different value in PT's X-Form settings.. maybe 5 minutes of coding if that.. and they won't do it.. Why not spend a couple hours coding and give us three options? Transient/Smooth/Balanced? Is that too much to ask in 2019?
Why not just implement ARA since they won't give us elastic pitch built in? I don't mean the way it is now, I mean something like melodyne or vari audio in Cubase.
It's not exactly easy to fit a vocal sung in an entirely different key into one's song in PT.. in other DAW's it's a snap. In Cubase and S1 you can actually set audio tracks to just follow your song chords!
In Logic at least we have an excellent integrated vocal pitch editor where we can just move the relevant notes that are out of key. Easy peasy.

I already know precisely who will attack me in this topic and try derail it, cause they do it to all my topics here no matter what.. So i have muted those members and ask that if anyone wants to have a serious discussion about this, and even if you just want to vent a bit, please feel free to..
Don't worry about the things I want in PT..If you have different needs and are disappointed for different reasons, let us know!

Join in if YOU also feel that Avid are treating you, a paying loyal customer, with contempt and you feel that they literally could not care less about you, or sadly, PT itself.. other than "keeping it working" to some degree. Cause this is how I feel right now.. When I joined in 2015 I thought I was going to see some amazing things by now.. and nothing has happened.. I don't understand it..

Why not sell the darn thing to a developer who cares? Bandlab now offer Sonar for FREE, and have done more for that program than Cakewalk did in 20 years! It's the best, least buggy and crash prone version ever to grace one's computer. Surely there is someone out there who wants to build on Pro Tool's amazing base structure and make it the very best it can be? Someone who actually *cares* about the darn thing!

[weezul]

I suffer from the same problems as you, below 128 buffer problems, (perfect performance at 32 in any other app) misrouted midi tracks on re-open... don't forget the classic stuck midi notes! I didn't know you couldn't nudge by sample values on MacOS... what is that error exactly? My normal use would be to fix phase. Perhaps I know it's 23 samples OOP, I would set my nudge to 23 samples and nudge once. Are you saying that doesn't work?

[AlexLakis]

Originally Posted by TNM

Why do you think Avid are so stubborn to put the radius algorithm setting back to where it was pre 2008 so it doesn't smush transients? Since radius actually has a transient setting built in, I know for a fact they just have to put a different value in PT's X-Form settings.. maybe 5 minutes of coding if that.. and they won't do it.. Why not spend a couple hours coding and give us three options? Transient/Smooth/Balanced? Is that too much to ask in 2019?

This has been my crusade for the past decade or so. Avid: Just give us a dialog box so we can access Radius' settings ourselves to determine which setting is appropriate for our source material! Or simply change it back to what you had set in Pro Tools 7.4! We were assured this was in the works, but silence for years...

[TNM]

Originally Posted by weezul

I suffer from the same problems as you, below 128 buffer problems, (perfect performance at 32 in any other app) misrouted midi tracks on re-open... don't forget the classic stuck midi notes! I didn't know you couldn't nudge by sample values on MacOS... what is that error exactly? My normal use would be to fix phase. Perhaps I know it's 23 samples OOP, I would set my nudge to 23 samples and nudge once. Are you saying that doesn't work?

That's correct.. The only work around is to put the MAIN ruler as samples, and the project *must* load with this ruler already set that way, and then it works. If you use bars and beats or any other as main rulers, it snaps to the wrong value.. on windows it doesn't do this and works perfectly. It's an acknowledged bug. Can you imagine when I knew the exact amount of latency I had to move something to get it phase perfect, and I was going nuts as I KNEW i had moved it the right amount and was still out of phase? LOL! I then finally tracked it down to realising it wasn't putting it where I asked.. It's a known bug with no timeline to fix.

Re performance, I have been expanding my performance testing and I know what's wrong.. PT used to allow me to use about 85+% real cpu on playback (for example I could get it to almost 700% of maximum 800% of an 8 thread machine.. which was amazing..and this was consistent up to PT 2019), when no tracks were record armed.. It would spread it so perfectly and be ridiculously efficient. With 2019, it's gone to about 65% max and it still might burp and stutter and overload.. This is why performance is much lower than Logic now where as before, as long as you had a 128 buffer or higher, it was actually in the lead. On the flip side, Logic is now able to use 85% of your total real cpu/cores where as prior it was about 70%. So, Logic's performance has been continually improved, and Pro Tools has gone backwards..

Of course I want to talk to support about it but they obviously have no clue what they are doing when it comes to the engine.. its like.. someone programmed it and now they have gone, and some trainees are maintaining it and making it worse.. That's the only thing I can think of. I really can not understand when I had months worth of emails with support about performance, and they said they knew all about it and could reproduce it, and they were fixing it (it was supposed to be fixed December last year latest), it's gotten a lot worse.
I have real projects, not benchmark tests, that really taxed the mac with PT 12.. and they can not even get close to playing back on the same mac now.
I have had to move those projects to the iMac Pro, where they will play back cause of the massive extra overhead vs the quad core laptop.

At this stage I am just not sure what to do.. I know that come December 2020 I will need 340 AUD to continue, or maybe even more if our dollar keeps dropping.. So part of me wants to go and buy literally 4 more years worth of those discounted renewals at Thomann as they still have them in stock, but the other part of me think that we might be exactly where we are now in 4 years, I'll be 50 and still whinging about PT lol.
MAYBE if support listen to me and understand what I am saying, that it stops playback with a much lower load than it did before.. maybe they will fix it...
Who knows.

I do remember that there was a 12.x point release with a performance issue like this, and they fixed it in the next release.. so maybe?? I am truly stuck. It's all money, and I am tired of giving it to ungrateful people.

Does anyone ever get the feeling that Avid board members sit back and literally hysterically laugh at us for continuing to give them money? I promise you that's how I feel sometimes, like I am their fool.. and it's a real uneasy feeling. Then other times I get a glimmer of hope and defend them (folders).. But that was a LIE!
They don't even say.. "sorry about that, there's a delay, it's coming soon".. or.. something! They just expect us to be good little sheep and comply.

One thing I truly DO wish is that every single person on the planet that uses Pro Tools, suddenly stopped renewing it, whether sub or perpetual.. so they'd actually be forced to sell, or would come to us, the users, to get a list of things that they HAVE to get done. I know it's a dream to think that but I really wish it could happen.

[TNM]

Originally Posted by AlexLakis

This has been my crusade for the past decade or so. Avid: Just give us a dialog box so we can access Radius' settings ourselves to determine which setting is appropriate for our source material! Or simply change it back to what you had set in Pro Tools 7.4! We were assured this was in the works, but silence for years...

The only way to do it is to get the x form plugin and muck about with the transient setting.. i was able to get great results the other day, slowing down some VERY transient percussion.. I compared directly against the PT included X form and the difference was night and day..
However.. that costs money, and also, it's audio suite.. so yes you can change something offline quickly and it sounds great, but it can't follow tempo.. For a fixed tempo project or just one change, that's fine.. it's a workaround to get stuff in time and sound good.. But for more complex projects.. you just want stuff to auto follow...
The joke is that they changed a number in a bit of PT code.. that's ALL this is.. that moved the radius transient setting to squishy.. and they won't change it back and no one has said they prefer it now.. If they can't do 5 seconds of work for something that MANY here have asked for, what hope is there for anything else? At least I know one thing, Avid has taken the lead over Apple for DAW developer that annoys me more than any other.. Apple still a close second cause they won't fix the automation timing bug in Logic.. Steinberg I actually kind of respect now.. I even get PM's answered in the forums from Steinberg top brass AND the programmers! They really keep trying to make their product great. Presonus, as much as I hate S1's gui and performance issues, they communicate and keep improving it as a DAW.. and they are TRYING to better performance with the new multi output VI each output uses it's own core thing. So I kind of respect them too. I have to say I have almost zero respect for Avid, now in December 2019.. Last year I still defended them all the time and thought they would fix everything and liked them still..

[capt kirk]

They are caught in a financial trap. Thats all there is to it. They cannot afford to have the amount of people they used to have , to throw at these problems. Furthermore, people who TRULY understand audio coding are getting EXCEDINGLY hard to find/keep. People have to be trained or sourced from other countries. Have they ever worked on mission critical audio, or did they code some games on an iphone and now theyre in charge of white noise blasts on protools? sync whats that, MIDI never heard of it.....who knows, they're never gonna say, but to stay afloat they need investment , you're money isnt near enough. If folders appear they know people like me will never buy another version, so I think some stuff has to be dragged out , for survival purposes.....why dont they go private?

[TNM]

Originally Posted by capt kirk

They are caught in a financial trap. Thats all there is to it. They cannot afford to have the amount of people they used to have , to throw at these problems. Furthermore, people who TRULY understand audio coding are getting EXCEDINGLY hard to find/keep. People have to be trained or sourced from other countries. Have they ever worked on mission critical audio, or did they code some games on an iphone and now theyre in charge of white noise blasts on protools? sync whats that, MIDI never heard of it.....who knows, they're never gonna say, but to stay afloat they need investment , you're money isnt near enough. If folders appear they know people like me will never buy another version, so I think some stuff has to be dragged out , for survival purposes.....why dont they go private?

Very interesting.. This does make me sad though..
So it's entirely possible they don't even know what they did to worsen performance for example? A bunch of noob's/kids fresh out of college as the lead programmers?
Couldn't they help their financial situation if they started being competitive so more would use their software? Why not make the core audio input count 64 like Logic for example... Be more fair with prices.. stop spending all this money on hardware.. You can do an ultimate version, but just make it core audio/asio, 256 ins and all the other fancy editing features it has.. and stop making it stupid money to get into! I am SURE they are losing money on AAX DSP, but please correct me if I am wrong.
Computers are powerful now so what they should do is drop the DSP and actually optimised the software to work at 32 buffer like Logic does..
I dunno.. just spitballing.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by TNM

Why not sell the darn thing to a developer who cares? Bandlab now offer Sonar for FREE, and have done more for that program than Cakewalk did in 20 years! It's the best, least buggy and crash prone version ever to grace one's computer. Surely there is someone out there who wants to build on Pro Tool's amazing base structure and make it the very best it can be? Someone who actually *cares* about the darn thing!

Sonar was quite good when I ran with it decades ago on one of my ancient Windows machines. And there's the rub: you either have to run a Winbox or use Bootcamp and Windows on a Mac. When Gibson owned Sonar they tried to do a Mac version and half-arsed it and used a code translator instead of writing regular Mac code. It never got out of alpha test and there was such an outcry from the Sonar Mac community they put it out as a freebie as-is. Wasn't soon after Sonar went to Bandlab.

[RyanC]

Originally Posted by TNM

Computers are powerful now so what they should do is drop the DSP and actually optimised the software to work at 32 buffer like Logic does..
I dunno.. just spitballing.

They've got so many of the HDX user base convinced that DSP is required for stability at low latency and many of them believe they are getting .7ms RTL in full sessions where each plugin has 8 samples here and 10 samples there and additional busses also add to RTL. That said, it seems that someone on HDX might be able to pull off ~2ms of RTL in real world project, where 32 sample buffer in a real world session is more likely ~3ms.

One quick question, I've seen your threads around and I'm getting much better VI performance in S1 than you seem to be. No problems recording even Diva in large sessions with 6 fx busses fully routed and in use at the 32 sample buffer. On my machines (haven't done a lot of formal testing) it seems to work better with VST plugins than AU. Curious if you gave that a shot.

I do wish S1 had full breakpoint automation on the clip gain, multi-ch support and something like automation preview. Also I think a double or even quad buffer option for VI's would be a great setting. Audio tracks incur 2x buffers latency and VI's only 1x...It would be great to have host buffer at 32 and VI's at 64 or even 16/32 or 16/64.

https://answers.presonus.com/45985/d...w=45985#q45985

To me it seems like the only part of Avid's audio division that's consistently doing anything is the eucontrol/euphonix folks.

I'd have no problem paying yearly for PT update plans (for 2, soon to be 4 PT|U licenses) if they were engaged and improving things.

[TNM]

Wonder why this topic was moved yet so many "not specific to 2019" topics remain in PT 2019.. when this WAS specifically aimed at 2019?