Feature requests for "Digi 003" and PTLE 7 for 5.1

[love666]

ditto on "skins" or ability to change the user interface. pro tools 5 gui rocks, pro tools 6 sucks. note on the tdm mac board the threads lamenting the instability of pro tools 6 on osx. all across the board, serious changes are in order. personally i'm returning to pro tools free with a tibook and a vx pocket and a trak 2. who knows, maybe someday i'll upgrade to a toolbox setup. but you know . . . i already did all that . . . years ago.

also i'm gonna try dp. and get into sonic osx for summing.

i would like to see the return of the user "666" who use to harass digi relentlessly.

so much of what this company does is so good. too bad it has to be mixed with really bad stuff that kills the deal.

[franco_tf]

Intresting ideas..What about a cheaper "HD" firewire box (with internal cpu prosses like some..(metric halo) interfaces, and very limited I-O , let's say : just adat I-O or 16 trs analog i-o (like the apogee box) and word clock...

"the cheapest interface from the HD line" "Post production box for the individual"

Well some dreams...cheers

[just_sounds]

IN OTHER WORDS GIVE US A TRAVELER DIGIDESIGN!!! and of course the ability to connect multiple travelers

[DrDVD]

Good posts, everyone. I agree with everything that the last few posters have said, with a partial exception to the following:

...so digidesign if you want stay the industry standard make sure that the beginning daw user likes your stuff and service because they will be the pro's in the next 5 years and i don't think you want them to be using nuendo because they liked cubase better when they where beginning their careers.

I don't mean to discount what you say, only to add with emphasis that not everyone who uses Digi's low-end stuff is a beginner. There are plenty of pros (defined as people who earn most or all of their living producing audio with these tools) who use PTLE gear for at least part of their work (particularly mobile professionals), and we hope Digi will keep us in mind as well.

[just_sounds]

Sorry, but i feel for the pro's i hope on day they can be pro tools compatible and have great signal paths on the road!!

[autodidactic]

Bumpin this thread

[brinaddison]

Perhaps the idea for the 003 I'm about to propose is silly (mostly to the folks at Digidesign), but I'm going to throw it out there anyway. Mostly, my gumpshon comes from the fact that It appears I've come to the end of the road for at least a little while on my Mac as far as Operating Systems go if I'm going to continue to use my DIGI 001. And I am, as I don't feel the 002 is much of an upgrade other than the 2 extra preamps and sample rate. Yeah, yeah I know, "The A/D/D/A drivers are better." Well not much better. And, personally I've used both and I find the sound I get at 44 and 48 KHz on the 001 to be clearer than the same rates on the 002. Unless the PT 7 features blow me away I won't switch. If they release an 003 with it and it's features blow me away, then again I'll consider the switch. But I'm about to propose an idea for the 003 that would make me definetly purchase it. I also think alot of MBox and 002 users would be motivated to buy it.

It has long been Digidesign's policy to not allow more than piece of Legacy gear to be used at a time. What if that were altered slightly. What if the 003 was setup to allow the connection of all previous legacy gear that came in breakout form. Now you don't allow the 001 for example to work with the new Pro Tools on it's own. However you do allow it to work if it's connected to the 003. The same with the others. So basically you put a USB port for the MBox, a Firewire port for the 002, and either a connection for the serial cable that connects the 001 or a PCI slot. What have you got. The first Digital Audio company to make their prior audio interfaces of not obsolete, but vintage. No, I don't know the logistics of how it would be done, it's merely a suggestion. A dream really.

Think about it you have an 001 w/ 8 I/O then you go out & get an 003. Now not only do you have a state of the art piece of Hardware w 8 I/O running the newest Pro Tools w/ 192 KHz SR and 32 bit Float. (like many have suggested.) But, becasuse you held on to your 001 if you need more I/O you can run a 44 or 48 KHz session and have 16 I/O and extra MIDI. If you have an MBox 10 I/O. If you have an 002 you have the same as an 001 w/ extra pre-amps and you can rum 96 KHz sessions. This should go for whatever comes after HD it should allow for TDM connectivity. One of the great things about all that great vintage gear we all love so much is that it's still so usable and sounds so great. Why can't the same be true with digital gear. Alot of great recordings have been done on 001's and TDM (I got that statement straight from Digizine.). Why should that gear wither and fade. I tell you what I'd be the first in line for the 003. Digidesign would get double purchases which they don't get now. Folks buying an MBox would later buy an 003 at full price.

Maybe they could make this a seperate piece of gear. Like an 003 Universal. Charge a little more than a regular 003. I also think Digidesign would wipe out any competition it has forever.

I like this idea! I don't think it will happen, and I don't think we should considder the 001 to be a sort after "Vintage" piece of gear, but I would rather see this than a heep of 001's in the landfill. If Digidesign were to adopt this sollution and some of the other more obvious ones (surround/more tracks/etc...), there would be a lot of happy customers out there who will quit whining for TDM SYSTEMS at the price of an LE system.

Me for one! I work on both PTLE and HD3 and there "IS" a fairly BIG difference ........... a $25,000 one?......... I don't think so, but a difference never the less.

This would make PTLE more competitive in the low-end market but it wouldn't compete with TDM, 'cause if all you have as "Vintage gear" is a 001 @ 44.1khz/48k, then that's all you can use together with the 003 and so on.

Another reason is that the 3volt PCI slot in the G5 would be moot. Hurray for that.

Good thinking Paxil!

[nedorama]

Just some thoughts. For me, I have my 002R in a 3-space shelf I built that supports my monitors and display, where the rest of my rack is around the corner.

DB25 I/O as an option - for long cable runs, DB25 cables could make it easier to avoid the cable mess and allow you to plug into wherever. Saves space, so if there were more than 8 I/O analog -- or make it an option to have more than 8 analog I/O and if people want more they can pay for it. If there were an I/O slot, you could make the same box for economies of scale, but different I/O cards for people who would want something different and could pay more.
- Alt idea - offer a regular box with no option, and a slightly more expensive one that is upgradeable.

FW800 -- it's great the 002R is Firewire 400, but shouldn't the newest also have the faster Firewire?

Studio Vision sequencing - ability to load and string several song sections together and then save it as a new song, both MIDI and audio together. It was cool in the mid 90's and for certain songwriting, it's great.

Phantom power on the front, please - don't want to have to reach around the back every time.

Better headphone amp - I have to crank mine up to 2 o'clock just to get some volume in my K271s.

Plugin Delay Compensation for LE - competitors are offering it; seems to make sense.

Better fader buttons - ditch the rounded kidney beans on the 002 and use the ones from Pro Control.

[just_sounds]

Is there anything coming up in the terms of new hardware? since mpowered i didn't hear any news and i would like to see a new box for my setup only with balanced connections and a 002 is to big for me to carry around

[DrDVD]

Nedorama, i agree with all your comments.

Regarding the sort of HD-lite idea that a few people have proposed - an LE box with a little bit of HD-style DSP (less than the HD1), I can imagine that being useful for folks with dinosaur computers who, for whatever reasons, might prefer to spend $2k on limited DSP hardware instead of buying a modern computer that supports higher track and plug counts (and certainly those people exist)... but I can't really imagine many people with reasonably fast computers (e.g. any G5) wanting to go that route, because such a limited DSP card would have less power than the host computer, and that would be paying a lot for what we already own (processing power - that's what we got the G5 for, right?) instead of putting that cash into something that would actually give us a noteworthy increase in functionality... and, in light of this, IMHO such a product would be a curious shrine to obsolesence. There is a market for products that add DSP power to host computers (e.g. UAD-1 and TC Powercore - and i own a UAD-1 so obviously i recognize there are benefits even on my G5), but i think that market is pretty well catered to already by those plug-in-specific DSP cards (various bugs notwithstanding).

One of the main themes of this thread, as i understand it, is recognizing that the industry as a whole is moving in essentially the opposite direction, away from dedicated, proprietary DSP and toward host-based systems, and this will only become more true as personal computer power continues to increase. Faster computers = gradually diminishing value and relevance of HD DSP cards. It's very true that no host system today can compete with HD3 Accel for raw DSP power, and for the very few who really need that much power and can afford HD3, it's a great way to go - but that's a shrinking minority of audio professionals.

Most of us can have our needs met for a fraction of the price with a G5, lots of RAM and Nuendo/DP/Logic... and what we want is for Digi to update their severely lagging PTLE product line to match the level of performance (as measured by track, plug-in, and virtual instrument counts at a given sample rate) we can get from these other host-based ("native," non-DSP-accelerated) DAW apps, so we can keep using our preferred (and in some cases required) software GUI (Pro Tools) in our home studio and mobile projects.

So, yes, we all want a performance upgrade, but adding an anemic DSP card to a 002 isn't going to provide that (except perhaps for users of the very oldest compatible machines). The forward-thinking solution, IMO, is for Digi to follow the lead of Apple, Steinberg, and MOTU and rewrite PTLE to take full advantage of the processing (and MULTIprocessing) power of the latest computers, with efficient coding and other thoughtful features that are being implemented by their competitors, such as the ubiquitous (excepting Digi) "track freezing" feature and DP 4.5's intelligent plug-in usage feature where plugz only eat DSP power when audio is actually being fed to them (whereas RTAS plugs are sucking power even during silence).

It's all about efficiency now, and the rest of the industry gets that. Digi, unfortunately, has a dilemma - a sort of midlife crisis: on the one hand, it may seem to some (both within and outside the company) that they have a vested interest in making their software as inefficient as possible, because that might (in theory) drive LE customers to upgrade to HD1, and HD1 customers to HD2, and so on, until that $2k Magma chassis is filled with HD Accel cards. Greater efficiency = decline in DSP card sales, or so it would seem from a perspective that forgets common sense and human nature. But our nature is to want to get the best bang for our buck, and common sense dictates that we consider all the options and make a balanced, reasoned decision on how to spend our limited Benjamins. Anyone who peers beyond the marketing smokescreens will see pretty quickly that, unless you're a commercial studio running 64+ tracks or you're doing a lot of work at 192k with lots of plug-ins, there's little if any benefit to an HD system compared to running Nuendo/DP on a top-end G5 loaded with ram and a UAD-1 or Powercore. Sure, there would be some benefit for a lot of us, but is it $8-$15k worth of benefit? Most think not, and i'm sure that at least some within Digi agree.

So i think you're correct in the sense that Digi would be wise to offer a product that bridges the enormous price and feature chasm between LE and HD, but adding a token DSP chip to an LE box won't do it. The answer, IMO, is to make PTLE truly rock on a G5 (or comparable windows box), with 64 tracks, 5.1 surround, 192k support, 32-bit float, automatic latency correction, better virtual instrument support, and very intelligent DSP-efficient coding to maximize the power we can squeeze out of our fancy multiprocessing computers... plus hardware that lets us use our own high-end converters and preamps (like the 192 or 192 Digital i/o). Again, i'll pay around $2000 or so for that package, and Digi will still make bank because they'll be selling me a product that's comparable to the competition (if not somewhat inferior, still) at a much higher price point (the "Digi premium")... so the way i see it it's a no brainer for Digi.

Ancient Taoist proverb for enlighted marketing execs: Sell me what *I* wanna buy instead of what you wanna sell me, and you'll actually get more of my money.

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