3rd party ProTools Mixer, why not?

[Corey Shay]

I emailed Waves about this once. They replied to me saying that they couldn't because Digidesign hasn't opened up that market. But with enough persuasion it might happen...

There are just so many opinions in this industry that have negative things to say about the quality of mixes done in ProTools. To make matters worse, Digidesign has no public information on the specific workings of the mixer and how it crunches numbers. People have reported that other DAW's and digital mixers sound better (Paris, Sony, etc), but Digidesign really has nothing to lose by letting third parties develop their own mixer plugins for ProTools. Of course they can still charge the same amount of money for the software and hardware, and it would make the systems much more appealing to skeptics on its sound quality and versitility. More options equal safer investments.

A third party mixer in which you could control specific parameters such as dithering and quality vs efficiency would be a dream come true. With tweakable parameters it would seem that they would have to release specifics on its internal workings in a manual.

Does anyone here agree with me? Comments?

[Corey Shay]

Okay, back to the top, frankly I'm surprised no one has responded yet considering the heat the ProTools mixer has gotten lately.

[COCO]

Paris does sound good. I'm not nearly enough of a hacker to comment on this. A long winded bump, in essence.

COCO

[Kevin Nettleingham]

It would be cool if 3rd party companies could do that. We could have an SSL, Neve or Trident emulated mixer plug-in. That would be cool!

[blake eat world]

i believe the sound quality of the mixer was enhanced in 5.1

[ditherwerk]

Yea, this would be a GREAT thing! No other software can match ProTools' excellence and elegance when it comes to mixing and editing... To have 3rd party mixers would make it a juggernaut that couldn't be stopped!

...okay, sorry I got outta hand...

Really though, I've heard Paris' mixer, and it sounds pretty damn great - compared to PT.

We can only wish... If Digi won't let other software access ProControl, I'd doubt they'd allow 3rd party mixer plugs.