From where I am sitting in my armchair, one step removed, enjoying my retirement, it seems to me that there are some clear winners and losers following Avid’s 2022.4 restructure of the Pro Tools product range. In this article, I am going to share them with you.
Winner - Existing Perpetual License Holders With A Current Upgrade Plan
Even though Avid has stopped offering perpetual licensing to new users, the good news for existing users is that if you have a Pro Tools Standard or Pro Tools Ultimate perpetual license, with a valid upgrade plan then the cost of running Pro Tools remains the same, whether it be Pro Tools Standard at $199 or Pro Tools Ultimate at $399.
In fact, not only can you continue as before with a Pro Tools perpetual license, you will get the benefit of the new features that come to Pro Tools Studio, if you are currently a Pro Tools Standard user or Pro Tools Ultimate if you are a Pro Tools Ultimate user, although Ultimate perpetual license holders won’t get anything included in the new Pro Tools Flex bundle.
Winner - Pro Tools Artist - A Usable Low-Cost Entry Point
At last Pro Tools has a useful and cost-effective entry-level product.
Understandably, over the years people have complained about the high cost of entry into Pro Tools via Pro Tools Standard. Yes, there was the free option but ever since the release of Pro Tools First, despite some tweaking, the free version of Avid’s DAW has never really worked well enough. or been easily compatible because Pro Tools First didn’t support conventional Pro Tools sessions, instead, it only worked with what Avid called Projects, which is Avid’s collaboration vehicle.
With Pro Tools First, the limitations made it even harder for new users to get to grips with Pro Tools, which seemed at odds with the underlying premise of Pro Tools First, which was a way of getting people using Pro Tools.
With the introduction of Pro Tools 2022.4, Avid has done away with Pro Tools First and introduced Pro Tools Artist, a cost-effective entry solution, which supports both sessions and projects and has a usable number of tracks and plugins for someone new to Pro Tools to get to grips with it.
$10 a month for a version of Pro Tools that has 32 audio, 32 auxes, 32 instrument and 64 MIDI tracks with up to 16 inputs and outputs and comes with over 100 bundled plugins as well as supporting 3rd party AAX plugins (something else Pro Tools First didn’t do) surely means that this new version, Pro tools Artist, has a lot going for it?
Yes, it is a subscription-based product but for a cup of coffee a week this is a much better product to enable people to get going on their journey with Pro Tools as it works and is fully compatible with, and functions just like it’s bigger cousins.
What’s more, if you need more features for a specific project then you can rent Studio or Flex for a month or two and then the job is done drop back to the low-cost Artist version.
Winner - Fewer People Will Need To Pay The Premium For Pro Tools Ultimate With Pro Tools Studio
The headline for me from the transition from Pro Tools Standard to Pro Tools Studio is the addition of surround, ambisonics and immersive tracks.
With Pro Tools Standard, you could only have mono or stereo tracks, if you wanted to use anything more than stereo tracks you had to jump to Pro Tools Ultimate with the significant price premium that came with it, as well as potentially paying for some Ultimate features you didn’t need. To help support tracks with higher channel counts, Avid has increased the maximum number of audio tracks from 256 in Pro Tools Standard to 512 tracks in Pro Tools Studio.
Another Ultimate only feature that has been rolled into Pro Tools Studio is that you can now edit Clip Effects. Pro Tools Standard read any Clip Effects created by Pro Tools Ultimate but you couldn’t edit them in Pro Tools Standard. Now with Pro Tools Studio you can read and edit clip effects.
Avid has also brought the Advanced Automation options, which were only available in Pro Tools Ultimate into Pro Tools Studio. Advanced Automation options include Latch Prime In Stop, Manual Write, Write On Stop, Suspend, Preview, Punch Preview, Automation Capture, Punch and AutoJoin commands.
All these changes from Pro Tools Standard to Pro Tools Studio should mean there will be Pro Tools users who will no longer need to pay the premium for Pro Tools Ultimate, the features they needed Pro Tools Ultimate for, are now available in Pro Tools Studio.
Winner - Pro Tools Ultimate (Part of Pro Tools Flex) Unlocks The Native I/O Channel Limit
Bringing some Ultimate only features down into the mid-tier product - now called Pro Tools Studio, might be bad news for Ultimate users who may feel that their investment has been devalued. But these changes by Avid do provide some very good news for Ultimate users. Prior to this 2022.4 release, Avid set a limit to the number of channels of I/O for non HDX systems to 64.
With 2022.4, Avid has quadrupled this limit for Pro Tools Ultimate users to 256!
Compared to an HDX 3 system running in HDX Classic mode, where you get 768 voices and 192 channels of I/O. Now with Pro Tools Ultimate 2022.4, with Core Audio on a Mac or ASIO on a Windows computer, you have 2048 voices and up to 256 channels of I/O.
This is huge, It also means that with low latency Thunderbolt interfaces like the PreSonus Quantum 4848, the Apogee Ensemble Thunderbolt or the new Core 256 or AX64 from DAD, you can have a very powerful system with lots of I/O without needing to invest in Avid HDX cards or specialised DigiLink enabled interfaces.
For anyone working with Dolby Atmos, either in music or post this reduces the cost of entry significantly. I can’t help wonder if DAD knew about this change when they developed the new Core 256 and AX 64 interfaces as they seem to be tailor-made for this new version of Pro Tools.
Does this mean that I think all is sweetness and light in the Pro Tools garden? I am afraid the answer is absolutely not, there are some losers too.
Losers - Pro Tools Users Waiting For Features Other DAWs Already Offer
Now that Avid has restructured the product tiers, they have to work on significantly improving the products and do it quickly if they are not to be left behind. To illustrate this, here are just 3 areas that need addressing right now…
1 - ARA 2 needs to come to at least Pro Tools Studio and Pro Tools Ultimate, and preferably to Pro Tools Artist too. It’s in all the other major DAWs, we need it in Pro Tools too.
2 - Mac users need Pro Tools to be Apple Silicon Native so that we can take advantage of the improvements that come with being able to use all the power and features of the Apple Silicon design and be able to run all the plugins that are now capable of running natively on Apple Silicon. As you can see from this table, all the other major DAW manufacturers have been able to do it, why not Avid.
3 - Although the move to increase the Native I/O channel limit has been long overdue and will help significantly streamline Dolby Atmos workflows, what would really help would be to integrate the Dolby Atmos Renderer into Pro Tools. With Pro Tools we are forced to use the separate Dolby Atmos Production Suite or Mastering Suite and pipe audio back and forth between Pro Tools and the Dolby Atmos Renderer. Whereas the likes of Steinberg with Nuendo 12, Blackmagic Design with Resolve 18 and Apple with Logic Pro 10 all now offer an integrated Dolby Atmos renderer solution.
These are just three features that other DAWs have that still aren’t in Pro Tools. You can read more about them and more features that need to be in Pro Tools in our article Pro Tools 2022 - Features We Hope To See In A Future Release.
Loser - Precious Little Innovation From Avid In The Development Of Pro Tools
I would say to the Avid team, well done for overhauling the Pro Tools product tiers, but the job is by no means over. However, you cannot depend on the label of Pro Tools being an industry standard, I am afraid that strategy doesn’t have the leverage it once had. We speak about this in some detail in our article The Big Challenge Facing Avid With Their Pro Tools 2022 Pricing Tiers
To recover your leading position in the DAW market, you first need to bring key features to Pro Tools that are already in all your key competitors including the three listed above. Then, more importantly, you need to get back to being at the forefront of DAW development and be an innovator as you were in the early days.
I remember that when I working with the BBC back in the mid-90s, here in Manchester, England, in their quest to find a DAW for radio production, they tried to make a radio programme on every DAW available at the time and it was Pro Tools that won and the reasons were simple. Firstly, the quality and clearness of the Edit window and especially the audio waveforms, which were so much clearer and more accurate than other DAWs at the time and secondly they found that Pro Tools was the easiest DAW to learn to enable non-technical people to create content.
Back then, Digidesign did things better than their competitors as well as doing things that their competitors couldn’t do. Nowadays, it seems that Avid’s leadership in innovation has dropped away. There was a hint at what can be achieved with the development of the HDX Hybrid Engine, but arguably that was a solution to stretch the usefulness of a long-standing existing product rather than a brand new concept.
Users need more innovation, the sort brands like Apple bring, with features that we didn’t even know we needed but very quickly find we cannot do without, From my position, if Avid doesn’t innovate then users will leave the platform in even larger numbers than ever.
What About You?
Are you a winner or loser? What are you looking for from Avid to keep you using Pro Tools? If you have already moved away from Pro Tools, then what, if anything, would bring you back to Pro Tools?
Do share your constructive thoughts in the comments below…