Pro Tools 8.0.3: a developers perspective....

[Bob Brown]

Hi,

I wanted to offer a few thoughts about the Pro Tools 8.0.3 release. I have been working on this release for the past year. It has been fairly challenging for many reasons. I thought I might be able to shed a little light onto the release for those who are interested.

One of the challenges that we always face is a greatly increasing scope of things to support or consider to support while our resources have become more limited than ever. While helping plan and work on this release there were many things to consider. Just the operating systems we had to consider for support is rather daunting. We needed to consider support for Apple's Leopard, Snow Leopard with 32-bit kernel support, and Snow Leopard with 64-bit kernel support. Of course there sre Apple Intel based systems and PPC based systems. We also had to consider support of Windows XP, Vista 32 Vista 64, Windows 7 32-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit.

Now looking at hardware peripherals, we have an ever increasing set that we need to support. Just a few of those are the various generations of our HD cards and peripherals (96, 96i, 192, MIDI, PRE, SYNC, SYNC HD), our control surfaces (ProControl, DControl, DCommand, Command8, Control24), third party control surfaces, LE interfaces (MBox original, MBox2, MBox2 Pro, MBox2 Mini, MBox2 Micro, 002, 003, 11 Rack), M-Audio interfaces (too many to list), Mix peripherals (888/24, 882, 1622), Digidesign Expansion HD chassis, and other third party chassis.

We also support 5 translated languages for each operating system (English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean). Pro Tools also runs on other languages and allows support for all types of characters.

I'm really good at math but my head is starting to hurt trying to think about all of the test cases we need to look at to make sure everything is working properly. What's that... 7 operating systems times 30 plus pieces of hardware times 5 languages!

The Pro Tools 8.0.3 team and Digidesign as a whole had to make decisions on all of these things. None of these were taken lightly. Many involved research from our engineering groups and product management groups to determine the technical feasibility of supporting various configurations and the impact to our users. Unfortunately, we cannot always support all configurations.

As a software engineer, it is always a challenge to keep all of the configurations working properly on all of the operating systems. There are several million lines of code not including all of the plug-ins we build that must be maintained and updated to keep everything working properly. Many times we find that to provide support for a new operating system version, we have to redesign the portions of software to support it. Sometimes this redesign of the software does not easily allow for older versions of the operating system to keep working properly. Sometimes the redesign of the software requires significantly more software engineering and software testing than is possible for a release. This type of problem is one of the primary reasons that we end support for various operating systems or pieces of hardware.

The engineers at Digidesign are always looking for ways to improve the software and the processes we use for developing it. We always want to make it faster and easier for us to create more features, design more hardware, and make cooler products for everyone to use. As a matter of fact, many of the engineers and other employees at Digidesign are musicians and users of Pro Tools. We want it to work just as much as you do.

I'm off to practice my bass and play around with Pro Tools. Thanks for reading!

[Jonasfp]

We appreciate it allot
Time to see what 8.0.3 is like.

[danander11]

Thanks Bob,

You guys seem to be taking a lot of flack from the PPC guys right now, but I guess there is always going to be some of that whenever change occurs... We're a passionate lot.

Thanks for the post.. It's nice to hear from living souls at Digi.

Merry Christmas.

[nod25]

Thanks for your thread Bob.

Great to see a post from someone 'behind the hidden'.

Less faceless

[liquidtools]

Originally Posted by Bob Brown

Hi,

I'm off to practice my bass and play around with Pro Tools. Thanks for reading!

sounds like you aint got time to play that bass get to work. LOL

thanks for the insight I think digi really should open up these types of threads so people (like me) will understand and quit complaining. thanks again.

[fenderrocker]

Originally Posted by danander11

Thanks for the post.. It's nice to hear from living souls at Digi.

It's always nice to hear from the "higher-ups" speaking to the consumers as other humans and not just consumers. I can only imagine how overwhelmed they have been with all the new OS's and advances in technology lately.

Who knows what kind of stuff they have in stock for the future. Perhaps... more boom samples?!?

[Ludia]

Hi Bob,

This is a great thing you writing your insights here. Many of us appreciate it a lot, if not all of us. It's always hard to please everyone and I'm saying this from my own point of view (I'm in similar business). Communication might be even the hardest part of it, I understand not everything can be told in the open because there are too much variables that need to be taken into account to, for example, put out a roadmap in detail (nearly impossible). This thread of yours is a great start, it puts a face behind it all

Many thanks for all the effort, 8.0.3 runs like a charm here.

[sunburst79]

Take some time and chase the muse.

You cannot always make everyone happy and my hats off to anyone that can make things happen with less resources. I know that its not always easy.

Your post was nicely put.

Happy Holidays!

[DTheone]

Avid/Digidesign's problems are no different than Ableton, Propellerheads, Steinberg, Motu, Cockos etc...

Something is fundamentally wrong that everyone; (including you bob) continue to dance around; a native version of protools. I don't want to restart a debate that has spawned so many times here in these forums; but enough is enough.

Pro Tools Essentials is a perfect example and proof that this ship will continue to sink; you simply won't let go of an old way of doing business.

When we sit down to create, produce, remix, engineer etc... we too have to make painful decisions. We too have to consider hardware, software compatibility, investments in new hardware and software, budget etc...

This decade introduced us to Ableton Live, Propellerheads Reason and also Cockos Reaper, all are free from proprietary hardware, all are rewire capable. All have come along quite nicely and have replaced hardware/software in many a studio.

It's time to stop making excuses and start thinking forward like the aforementioned companies.

Can someone please put Shan and Guitardom on Avids payroll?



Edit:

Please look at my signature below; this system was built with protools 8 M-powered in mind; I do not hate avid/digidesign; I'm just not in favor of the old way of thinking that is stalling the inevitable.

[O.G. Killa]

Originally Posted by DTheone

Avid/Digidesign's problems are no different than Ableton, Propellerheads, Steinberg, Motu, Cockos etc...

Something is fundamentally wrong that everyone; (including you bob) continue to dance around; a native version of protools. I don't want to restart a debate that has spawned so many times here in these forums; but enough is enough.

Pro Tools Essentials is a perfect example and proof that this ship will continue to sink; you simply won't let go of an old way of doing business.

When we sit down to create, produce, remix, engineer etc... we too have to make painful decisions. We too have to consider hardware, software compatibility, investments in new hardware and software, budget etc...

This decade introduced us to Ableton Live, Propellerheads Reason and also Cockos Reaper, all are free from proprietary hardware, all are rewire capable. All have come along quite nicely and have replaced hardware/software in many a studio.

It's time to stop making excuses and start thinking forward like the aforementioned companies.

Can someone please put Shan and Guitardom on Avids payroll?



Edit:

Please look at my signature below; this system was built with protools 8 M-powered in mind; I do not hate avid/digidesign; I'm just not in favor of the old way of thinking that is stalling the inevitable.

Well, I think you are going to be very happy with Avid over the next couple years. You say protools essential is an example of how Digi will fail but in a lot of ways it's the beginning of digi/avid's resurgence. And it was smart for them to do.

Technically speaking... Essentials is the easiest and most cost effective solution to replace M-audio's outdated and unsupported recording software "Session" that came for free with every product. It is much easier for them to maintain Essentials because it IS protools, all they have to do is turn off certain sections of the software. It isn't design to take over LE... it's design to be an introduction to protools. It's not for people that produce music professionally, it's for the 13 year old kid who has been taking guitar lessons for a year and wants to start recording himself in the computer for the first time.

All I can say is, there are a lot of good things coming from digidesign. But as Bob and others have mentioned...the development cycle for any product is a long and tedious journey in and of itself. When you add external factors like major OS and computer platform changes and layoffs... the cycle becomes longer and longer and more difficult.