Thoughts of LE

[Jonne]

Hi,

I just have to vent. I´ve been using protools (LE at my home and HD3 at our studio) for years now and as I like the HD very much the LE seems just like a joke. It´s way too expensive and very limited, even with the music production toolkit installed. First, I have MBOX 2 Pro at my home and the preamps are really nothing to speak about. Digital I/O is only one way ?! So you can´t record and playback simultaneusly. I thought this would be so obvious that I even didn´t check it and now I´m switching my lavry blue constantly. At least midi in/out works as one would think so perhaps that´s the PRO part here. I also thought that there would be 48 instrument channels, but there´s only 32. Why on earth to limit the count ? The only reason I "upgraded" to Mbox2 Pro was that the original MBOX2 connects via USB and it gave me a constant and very audible (high)tone when I opened Protools. I learnt that this was to do with the USB grounding and since the PRO had wirefire, it now works without "external" voices. Also the build quality looks very cheap. (like the HDs interface boxes also look very cheap, but that´s not really an issue I think..). Btw. I had MIAMIDI card when I had PC years ago, and it had miles better ADDA than the Digi Le hardware still. I think it was 130 euros.

Also the software that comes with the ignition pack 1 (I know it´s discontinued) was pretty lame, with the exception of Reasond and TLSPACE perhaps. XPAND (Which ironically you can´t expand sounds just bad and I would not use it on any commercial project. Ok for scetching though. I´m mostly using Le as a sequencer (external/soft) and doing all the audio processing at our studio, so I thought it would be enough for sequencing only.

I know I´m paying for the software and I very much like it, but all the accessories just yell horror, especially if you even think about the PRO part here. Mayby I´m taking it too literally? Behringer also makes PRO products and I can adjust to that properly (eventhough I don´t own anything else than a cabletester from them). I also understand that Digi really can´t make the LE "better" businesswise. I wouldn´t if I were Digi and would like to sell more HDs.

I´m just saying this because I hope that somebody would have brought this to my attention when I was figuring out what to buy. I would´ve saved a lot of money and perhaps I would´ve spent it on another HD setup (most likely) or something else like Logic/Cubase, but really LE isn´t worth the hassle in my opinion. Especially if you think that Logic/Cubase is lurking out there.


Yours,
Jonne Valtonen