Is Pro Tools dying?

[Tone]

Is Pro Tools dying?

The short answer is sadly yes but actually pretty slowly. An awful lot of people and big facilities still have it but they will eventually get fed up with Avid's many odd policies. In this day and age, you have to work very hard and stay very hungry to remain competitive, something Avid is not good at.

[ckreon]

What's happened is pretty typical of any great product in a capitalist environment.

Pro Tools dug solid roots in the 90's, and became a real tool for the professional users. It consolidated work-flows and gave the industry a new consistent platform. Maybe most importantly, it completely opened up the world of digital audio editing in a way no other digital solutions did (and in my opinion, no other competitor has yet to match up to this day).

This not only changed the way audio engineers worked, it changed music.

Since pro's used it almost exclusively, of course up-and-comers looked to Pro Tools as "the" platform. If you had a Pro Tools rig, you were serious. It became more than a tool, it became a symbol of confidence and professionalism.

So, it becomes a huge success. Big surprise. Well, with success, follows the money sniffers. Big business.

Big business doesn't look at things the way users do. They saw (and see) Pro Tools as a resource. Plain and simple. Their goal is to mine the resource as long and as thoroughly as possible.

At first, they'll attack the primary markets (the big vein). In this case, they found out that their primary market weren't the ones that just ran out for every new release (or even patch) like typical consumers in other markets.

Their market invests into something, gets it working, jazzes it up a bit if they can (outboard, converters, etc.), and then doesn't really change a damn thing until either:

a) something breaks, or
b) something comes along that they can't afford to ignore.

That's a tough and slow resource - not at all ideal for the capitalist markets.

They needed to start getting their product into the hands of people that didn't have the same constraints as their core market (which was basically needing to be 100% stable and compatible with the rest of the industry).

Once enough of the new market was saturated with PT users, they started having to compete with other consumer software companies. These companies didn't have the same pressure as Digi/Avid, as they sell to hobbyists and musicians pretty much exclusively. They can sacrifice certain things to gamble in other areas of appeal (flashy UI's, gimmicky features, etc.).

The problem is that a professional tool simply cannot compete with a consumer tool in any real way. They are different worlds. The professional behavior is too slow and too cautious. They won't jump on new things "just because." So the compromises started, and now here we are.

We have a platform that was designed for a proprietary environment (would only run on Apple computers and required specific hardware), that is now completely open to run on any computer with any hardware, and has been ported and adapted into the live sound arena as well. That genius core created so many years ago has been pulled and stretched to the point of tearing, all because a larger market was needed.

Now, you can look at this with negativity in certain ways, but it's important to realize that, while big business is to blame for a lot of our current issues, it is also to blame for Pro Tools still existing. If the primary market had not been spread like it was, when the industry fell, PT would have fallen with it. There simply isn't the demand for such a platform anymore with the lack of any major studios being open (and the lack of any labels to fund major projects).

But since the core market got opened up to the consumer level, it did just fine. Great even! They may not have been making $30,000 sales as much, but they made up for it with all of the $1,000 sales they were now bringing in from the (very happy) home-user market.

But you can't sell a pro-sumer product to a consumer market. And that brings us right back to the top.

So yes, it is dying, but so is everyone and everything. That's life, and more importantly, that's business. There's growth, maturity, and decline. Pro Tools is in decline with all of its claws stuck in the mountain to slow down the death as much as possible. 10 almost killed Avid, so hopefully they get it together with 11. I don't like the thought of having to edit in another DAW...

[capt kirk]

you start dying , the minute your born.....btw.......anyhow, be thankful that AMS Audiofile never became a standard, in any meaningful way. if you REALLY wanna see how NOT to market, design, and update a potentially useful pro 'tool'....its a test case of how to ruin something by being british....only Sony could upstage them with cultural and corporate arrogance, with the 'we know best' attitude....sad, could have taken a huge chunk of the present Protools users

[derFunkenstein]

As long as the product is easy to use and creates good results, it'll draw users. For my money, PT has the best workflow for what I do. I am a long-time Cakewalk user that discovered PT in the late 7.4 days/early 8.0 days. Is there some cruft? Sure. Are there errors and bugs? You bet. Can I get around it and just make music? Absolutely.

[rockridge]

When Avid jumped to 10 so fast, I could see trouble on the horizon.

Why would they move to another 32 bit version, and at the same time, tell us to hold on for 64 bit?

I don't buy their reasoning... 10 should have been 9.1
100 bucks for the native upgrade; 500 for dsp.

Leave the sexy number '10' for the 64 bit release!

Why would they ditch the 'brand' RTAS?
Why not call the new format RTAS 2 or RTAS 64?

And it should have been backwards compatible.
Have the new format incorporate the old with the new.
At least, have PT 11 load 32 bit RTAS along side.

Don't tell me there was no way... there is always a way!
Avid is squandering much of their goodwill with all these desperate moves.

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by rockridge

Don't tell me there was no way... there is always a way!
Avid is squandering much of their goodwill with all these desperate moves.

There would have been a way if Avid had kept the Digi development and engineering staff of 400~500 or so individuals that specialized in audio software and hardware/dsp development, some of whom had been with digidesign for 10~15 years and longer.

Instead Avid fired them all so Avid could move the fired employee's now unspent salaries over to Avid as a way to try and "cook" the books and compensate for the huge loses Avid division was (and still is) having.

Now with no development and engineering staff, Avid farmed out software and hardware development to Global Logic.

http://www.globallogic.com/our-clients.html

the engineering and development teams at Global Logic are good. But they are not "audiophile DAW and DSP" experts at all. A couple of the guys on Global Logic's core "Avid/Protools" team (about 10 guys) in Kiev are musicians but none are recording engineers or post audio editors. Most don't understand the need for a lot of the "under the hood" functions since they don't understand common production workflows. Why does it matter if the DAW drops samples or not? Why does it matter if the daw can't run for 24 hours straight playing a project with 192 tracks and edits across all tracks every 3 seconds? What's the point of trim automation and auto join? And so on...

The value in a company like Global logic is its ability to scale up and down based on need. For PT10 for example, Global logic most likely pulled developer teams from other projects and had 50 to 100 or maybe even 200 people focused on writing different bits and pieces of Protools 10 for 3 or 4 months before it's release... maybe even 6 months. After it's release, global logic sent everyone back to the normal products they develop and the 10 protools guys stay on to fix bugs and maintain the software.

When I worked at Dragon Systems in the late 90's we looked into doing this same thing. But in testing different companies similar to global logic, while they were jacks of all software development trades, they were masters of none. The knowledge needed to write audio programs like a DAW or speech recognition software is highly specialized compared to the audio needs of a program like Windows Media Player or Skype. Most of the engineers at Digidesign were AES/SMPTE/EBU etc members just like most of the engineers at Dragon Systems. As far as I know, none of the developers at Global Logic assigned to Pro Tools belong to AES/EBU/etc.

Avid has basically "sold the horse to save the carriage", so to speak. But now they have nothing to drive/propel the carriage and generate substantial revenue. Within Digidesign, the development and engineering group created the products that would sell because most of the developers that were at Digidesign were themselves sound engineers, composers/musicians and post audio professionals.

We are now starting to see the repercussions of their "layoff, consolidate and outsource" plan that Gary Greenfield and Kevin Arnold implemented in 2008.

Just look up Avid Technology on the glassdoor website. You'll see employees were predicting this outcome since 2008, when Greenfield came in. Everything has a "momentum" to it, including businesses. Business decisions made today will not see a final outcome/resolution for 3 to 5 years. That is why the CEO of any company needs to really focus on long term strategies because whatever decisions are made will hit the company 3 to 5 years down the road. It is very apparent from the reception of PT10 and HDX10 as well as the AVID stock price, Greenfield's directions for the past 4 years have been the wrong way to go.

[WernerF]

Originally Posted by O.G. Killa

It is very apparent from the reception of PT10 and HDX10 as well as the AVID stock price, Greenfield's directions have been the wrong way to go.

Amen!

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by Bob Olhsson

From mine digidesign and Avid's marketing has always been a complete train wreck and they became successful in spite of very very bad marketing!

Yes my friend I could not agree more !!!!! Well said !!!! Hear, Hear !!!!

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

I would anticipate it being "fixed" in PT 11...

[derFunkenstein]

Originally Posted by derFunkenstein

As long as the product is easy to use and creates good results, it'll draw users. For my money, PT has the best workflow for what I do. I am a long-time Cakewalk user that discovered PT in the late 7.4 days/early 8.0 days. Is there some cruft? Sure. Are there errors and bugs? You bet. Can I get around it and just make music? Absolutely.

Can I buy an unused upgrade from any old seller after 10 comes out and expect to get upgraded to 10? Apparently not. Here I am talking up how great the software is and then Avid breaks one off in my butt by not taking care of people who just want to give them money. Ah, karma, how I miss thee...

[capt kirk]

well, as good as its been,i'll not pay ANOTHer 300, unless i get some severe amount of pro lexicon/eventide/ssl stuff included. pt10 does it all now,editing and auto etc. i couldn't care lesss about 64bit. its almost perfect for me,now.