PT11 - Who Cares??

[rus5]

I've gotta say it. I'm trying to sift through the issues with my new PT11HD upgrade. As far as I can tell, it is absolutely useless to me. I have some major issues with its basic functioning, Avid hasn't even bothered to port its own key plugins like Eleven Rack, Revibe, X-form and many others to it. Its been two years since AAX was announced and very very few developers have plugins ready for it despite Avid's absolute assurances it was EASY to develop for. Many of the ones who have, or will, aren't going to support Avid's HDX platform at all because its too hard to write for, again despite Avid's absolute assurance that once you've got an AAX-Native going, its a simple step from that to AAX-DSP - which turned out to be a flat out bold faced lie. And Waves (hate them or not, pretty basic to our business) is NEVER going to write for -DSP. And I'm told by many these days that plenty of other DAWs work just as well or better in a professional environment and don't have any of these problems. In my own case, I have PT11 running (poorly) and I can't see using it to do actual work for, well, I guess I can't even guess but probably at least another year at the rate things are going. Further, Avid as a company has been so badly run (thank you Chris Gahagan and Louis Hernandez and, of course Gary Greenfield) that they're almost out of business, their stock is 10% of what it was a few years ago, NASDAQ has formally threatened to delist them, they failed to even provide their required financial report several months ago and they have several lawsuits piling up against them. So my question is, even though it seems faster and has some improved features (many of which the other DAWs have already had for years), PT11: who cares??? I still have to use PT10 anyway and will as far forward as I can see. Unless I switch to another DAW. What am I missing??

[Drew Mazurek]

Sounds like you might have made a bad business decision upgrading so fast.

Tell us why you did this, what was your process like? Did you research it thoroughly? Check with 3rd party devs as to their plans to support AAX2 and what their timetable was?

[rajadrone]

1. Pro Tools will survive Avid, if ever the company dissolves.
2. It has been 1 1/2 years since the announcement of AAX; there are many companies that have devloped this for new format and will update to the 64bit version in the coming days, weeks, and months.
3. Eleven & Revibe are AAX 64bit, the updated installers are included with the 11 package. X-form - who knows? Send support an email.
4. Please provide the specifics in regards to your troubles and include systems specs.
5. This is DAY 3 of the 11 release and since PT10 is useless to you and you expected 11 to be an answer?

[rus5]

Thanks for the response. Replies below:

Originally Posted by rajadrone

1. Pro Tools will survive Avid, if ever the company dissolves.
-Maybe. I hope so.

2. It has been 1 1/2 years since the announcement of AAX; there are many companies that have devloped this for new format and will update to the 64bit version in the coming days, weeks, and months.
-People have been saying this exact same thing from the beginning. It simply has not been true.

3. Eleven & Revibe are AAX 64bit, the updated installers are included with the 11 package. X-form - who knows? Send support an email.
-Not so. Eleven user interface has not been ported to 64-bit and Revibe doesn't even show under Avid's 64-bit compatible list. By the way, McDSP does show on that list and is not yet compatible (though it might be an example of one that will soon per your comment above - yet they've stated that exact thing for months - any day now - and have not yet.

4. Please provide the specifics in regards to your troubles and include systems specs.
-The main problem (besides almost nothing being available for it after MORE than 2 years if you consider the start time being when the developers first knew about it), is I get various "system has halted due to processor overload" flavored errors when first playing something back. There are several versions of errors. But I'm running the latest Mac Pro 12-core w/ 16gb memory and the load meter shows basically nothing for all 24 processors (each core is dual thread) for the cases it happens on. I run it for 2 or 3 seconds until the error appears, restart 4 or 5 times without changing anything, and on about the 6th play, it behaves normally (for some time - don't know how long it will go as I can't trust anything after that's happened so what's the point from there?).

5. This is DAY 3 of the 11 release and since PT10 is useless to you and you expected 11 to be an answer?

-Of course I do. They've been developing it for YEARS. YEARS!! And they've lied all along about AAX and especially AAX-DSP. If what they'd been saying was true, by now, there would be a mountain of plugins available, including Waves, which will never be available for AAX-DSP, despite Avid personally assuring me it would.

[Danny Caccavo]

Rus, if you are on Mac, I would highly recommend you update to OS X 10.8.4. I know that support doesn't yet list it as qualified, but it fixes a lot of the spurious overload errors that are actually caused by Apple's "sandboxing."

(I hope Avid CS doesn't yell at me!)

[rus5]

Originally Posted by Drew Mazurek

Sounds like you might have made a bad business decision upgrading so fast.

Tell us why you did this, what was your process like? Did you research it thoroughly? Check with 3rd party devs as to their plans to support AAX2 and what their timetable was?

Yeah, you'd think I'd learn. I assumed by this time, they had to have gotten it right. I kept reading that everybody had their AAX versions out, and I've bought a lot of them, but they've been evasive about the fact that they'd only ported to 32-bit AAX, not 64 so they'd be ready to go on launch day. Avid themselves responded to a post of mine a few months ago saying that basically every developer that was porting to AAX was porting to 64-bit AAX. As with everything Avid says - not true at all. So I'd be overstating my case if I called what I did a "process", I simply assumed that since PT10 was a colossal screw up, the bridge period to get to 64-bit and not much more, when they released that, things would finally ready. Again, based on everything I was reading.

[Emcha_audio]

Originally Posted by rus5

Thanks for the response. Replies below:


-Of course I do. They've been developing it for YEARS. YEARS!! And they've lied all along about AAX and especially AAX-DSP. If what they'd been saying was true, by now, there would be a mountain of plugins available, including Waves, which will never be available for AAX-DSP, despite Avid personally assuring me it would.

What else do you have on that mac pro? I've run both Pt 10 and PT 11 without a flaw on a windows build and it should be even more stable on a osx, so you've got to ask yourself, what else do you have installed on that mac that could be conflicting with pro tools.

[Craig F]

word is ReVibe had a last minute bug pop up so it had to go back to the code shop

If McDSP isn't working, I sure there working to get the problem solved (or Colin final ran out of steam) or they were at Sweatwater's gear fest and were caught off gard

[rus5]

Originally Posted by Danny Caccavo

Rus, if you are on Mac, I would highly recommend you update to OS X 10.8.4. I know that support doesn't yet list it as qualified, but it fixes a lot of the spurious overload errors that are actually caused by Apple's "sandboxing."

(I hope Avid CS doesn't yell at me!)

Hi Danny,

Thanks very much for this!! Yes, by shear accident I happen to have updated to 10.8.4 just before doing the PT10-PT11 upgrade. But thanks for the suggestion!! (no way Avid's going to yell at you for being helpful!!!)

[rus5]

Originally Posted by Craig F

word is ReVibe had a last minute bug pop up so it had to go back to the code shop

If McDSP isn't working, I sure there working to get the problem solved (or Colin final ran out of steam) or they were at Sweatwater's gear fest and were caught off gard

Hi Craig,

Yeah, gotta say, I have a strong impression that Colin is humping it as hard as he can to get things working. Its a great business opportunity for him with Waves backing out of DSP. Too bad other companies don't seem to realize that but then, they're probably not as smart as Colin obviously is. I can't wait for him to do it either, I love his stuff!!

Thanks very very much for the inside scoop on ReVibe!!! I just assumed it was being abandon by Avid and am very very glad to hear it's not - paid a lot for that sucker. Thanks for that!!!