Pro Tools Express and 3rd Party Plugins

[sighermike]

Hello,

I'm sure this was answered but I did a search and didn't readily find the answer. If it was, my apologies.

I'm a PT 11 user and I have a number of plugins that no longer work in 11, being they're RTAS, such as DrumCore 3. Also the Native Instruments free bundles, which are still not AAX. I'm going to get my son a cheap interface that comes with Pro Tools Express and wanted to verify PTE will recognize the software.

When I first got into this, back during the Digidesign PT 8 era, I was given a free version of Pro Tools (PT Essentials, I think it was). It did not recognize third party plugins at all, and had its track and aux limits as well. You could only use 3 inserts, and 3 sends per track, etc. Is PTE, in essence, a full version that's stripped down of the free VI's and limited by track count, etc? Does that make sense?

Thank you in advance,
Mike