An observation about PT using Mbox2...

[Hooper]

I am posting this, knowing that there might not be any responses to it. However, I felt the need to post my thoughts, and then some questions, as to the affordable capabilities of PT LE as a home platform. I am a professional musician, and have played on hit records, and I only mention this to somewhat qualify my thoughts. Many of the brick and mortar studios I play at, use Pro Tools HD.

I am not doubting the power of the LE version, but as I have now began learning the program over the past three weeks, I have realized that this might not provide the total package needed to produce professional sounding tracks in the home environment due to the financial aspects and costs of add-ons and plug-ins.

I'm not an engineer, and probably didn't pay enough attention to the capable engineers working on various projects over the years to gain a working knowledge of how things get set, recorded, and the tools used to complete the mastered product. But then, that wasn't my job. However, as these systems have migrated into the home/project studio's, it is now obvious to me that I have a long way to go in order to produce reasonable results as I now need engineering abilities and it IS now my job. I am willing to "pay my dues" to become more proficient at engineering. But what I feel I can't overcome is the cost of add-ons needed to help get closer to these results. For a professional facility, the costs of this are just a fact of life. But to user’s, such as myself, who hear the difference in one plug-in reverb, verses another, and then look at the costs to get that desired plug-in into the home, it’s almost un-affordable. Sure, you can do it, but then, why not just go to a pro studio and do it? I like the ability to work on ideas at home and off the clock.

One other example I will share is, one of the groups I play with, uses Digital Performer 4.6 on a Mac (I’m PC), and thus, I will need the DigiDesign Translator to allow us to import/export audio sessions back and forth to share ideas. The cost of this program is almost $500.00. Can’t there be scaled down versions of this, and other such plug-ins that’s somewhere between Pro and home (HD verses LE), that will allow us to do this more affordably?

Thanks for reading, and as always, it’s just my thoughts…I like Pro Tools and if I'm missing something, which is possible, I would love to hear from others with their solutions and thoughts on this.


Jerry

[albee1952]

Welcome to the DUC. Just curious what "add-ons" you can't live without that are making your investment look so daunting. $1K will buy plenty of solid plugins and is cheap compared to a single high-quality compressor or reverb (hardware). As for sharing sessions with those on other platforms, that can be frustrating. I have a friend who was running PT on a PC that I built for him. While it worked fine, he got fed up dealing with sharing sessions with friends on MAC systems. Rather than master the skills needed, he just gave up and bought a MAC. In any case, there are some steps to make transfer cheaper. Take your session and consolidate all tracks into single continuous files.(wave or AIFF). Note the names of the actual audio files. Close protools and go to the session folder>audio files folder>copy the required files to a CD/DVD. Take those files to your pal's DP setup and import the audio into a DP session. Better yet, bounce your rough to a stereo interleaved file and copy that onto a CD/DVD. Do the same trick to bring audio from the DP setup back to your place. As long as bit depth and sample rate are the same, you should be able to transfer audio that easily instead of trying to deal with full session info. There's more than one way to .......