Before I say what I am about to say, I think no one could accuse us of being anti-AAX on the Pro Tools Expert Blog. Mike has single-handedly being pushing the AAX message both here via our FREE online database and he has dedicated 2 pages to AAX in this month’s Sound On Sound magazine. So outside of Avid, we’re probably AAX’s biggest fan.

However, we talk a lot, both to Avid and to the plug-in manufacturers and the stories don’t seem to match up, we’re not suggesting conspiracy, more confusion. You can see our interview from NAMM this year with Sonnox, McDSP and Avid, all very positive about the AAX platform.

Many 3rd party companies are working on AAX, but often they say ‘native only’. However one of the big ‘selling points’ when AAX was launched was that coding for native and DSP would be very similar, I repeat similar NOT identical. This seemed to imply that there would be less reinventing the wheel to create a DSP version from a Native one.

So if this is the case, why are so many vendors reluctant to commit to DSP versions of AAX? If we’re not careful there could be a lot of HDX hardware sitting doing nothing in terms of effects processing.