In a recent poll of the Pro Tools Expert community, we asked "What if you got a do-over and had no workflow, session or hardware baggage to consider. If you were choosing your first DAW then would you choose Pro Tools?"
We have known that over the transitional period Pro Tools has been going through over the last couple of years that some Pro Tools users have grown weary and felt disenfranchised, but we did not expect to see this response from nearly 1000 Pro Tools users who voted in our poll.
To date the results show that 50.15% of Pro Tools users would buy Pro Tools if they were starting again and 49.85% said they would not, when rounded that put the result as half in favour and half against.
However, some good points were made in the comments, Grant Hall listed his reasons for sticking with Pro Tools as;
-The only Scaleable DAW made
-Integrated Interfaces with DSP Hardware
-Native and Hardware Playback Engines
-Scaleable Professional Control Surfaces
-Hardware upgradable so you never locked on old technology yet interfaces from 2002 still works with 2017 cards and software
-Playback Hardware Engines are scalable with guaranteed high track counts with zero CPU usage
-Scaleable I/O from 2 channels to 192 channels
Conversely, Pro Tools Expert regular Gonk said something that will resonate with many Pro Tools owners;
As a newbie I'd say that Pro Tools is looking (feature wise) a little long in the tooth, no meaningful updates in at least 18 months, whereas Cubase, Logic, Studio One and REAPER keep piling on new features and fixes and at the price and feature set I'd probably plump for Studio One or Logic
What is even more interesting is that there seems to be a lot of post-production users who still see the merits of a Pro Tools workflow; whereas music production users find it less attractive. Perhaps it is time for Avid to concentrate on the post-production market, or perhaps they are perceived as already doing it?
Discuss.
