Post
by leedsquietman » Fri Mar 02, 2007 10:41 pm
You state some good points and the latency thing is also true to a point although saying you need 1-2 ms latency to accurately track is a little bit overestimated, hell, hardware synths typically have a 4-5 ms latency when you press a key. So long as your latency is less than 10 ms (in and out combined so 5ms setting on your audio card, ie 128 samples) many wouldn´t notice the difference, even the PT HD system has some latency albeit a teeny bit less than a traditional PCI interface set to like 64 samples or something on a very powerful setup.
No-one was claiming instability with PT HD or the fact that it has a lot of features, especially with regard to audio - people were merely stating that the cost is astronomical, there are professional DAWS out there such as Sequoia, Nuendo, SAWstudio Pro and Radar which feature as many (and usually more) features, which when combined with top rate pres and audio interfaces offer as much (if not more) than PT HD for less money. Yes, PT built up a reputation that put them at the top but that was mostly established in the 90´s when they still needed to put some effort in, since then the performance, pricing and evolution is at least open to debate.
Ditto PTLE and M-Powered yes, their obvious advantage is the fact that you can import the project into PT HD but PTLE and M-Powered are so lacking in features, offer a very low track count and very meagre MIDI options that you either need to rewire something like Live or Reason into it to make it functional as a MIDI composing tool, the RTAS plugins are very restricting in availability compared to vst and it terms of value for money ... well, I think the pricing should be lower.
If all I had was PTLE etc, my music would suffer greatly, low track count, low plugin count (unless you drop a bunch of money on ´bombpakz´or whatever), very ordinary USB audio interface with very ordinary pres, lack of real time mixing control / automation, lack of powerful MIDI editing and lots more things I take for granted in Cubase SX3 and even Live 6.
BTW ´saying that Logic, DP and Cubase/Nuendo come from MIDI so their audio sucks may have been true 5 or 6 years ago but all of these have been rebuilt and all of them with an emphasis on audio' - the audio is no longer just a 'tacked on' extra. Cubase 4 for example is introducing MIDI things that have been absent ever since VST5.1 which was a MIDI app with tacked on audio because the MIDI in the SX series (esp SX1) was severely lacking what had been in VST, as the whole app was totally rebuilt from scratch but the audio engine was much, much better as a result.
Besides, the audio engines and summing are all so close that it´s mostly plugins, pan law settings and mastering that make the difference in this respect.
It would be good for ProTools to have to compete, it would be great for Protools users to see Nuendo and Sequoia etc grab a bigger slice of the pie that way Digidesign/Avid would have to make PT more feature rich or reduce costs to stay competitive. And give engineers and musicians some choice instead of being drones to Digidesign through default.
GAFM ***