Recording - March 2011 - 46

...where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording

AVID PRO TOOLS 9
—THE DUST HAS SETTLED
As we reported in our AES 2010 report (February 2011), Avid Pro Tools 9 was perhaps the biggest news in San Francisco last October. We asked power user Mark Hornsby to evaluate what the buzz was all about, and describe in practical detail what the new features mean to Pro Tools users at the various levels.—Ed. by Mark Hornsby
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard that Avid, the artist formerly known as Digidesign, released Pro Tools 9. Needless to say, it’s been crazy: mass hysteria everywhere, dogs and cats living together, the Mayan calendar being condemned for being off by a year, etc. and so on. So, all that drama aside, what’s new in Pro Tools 9 that could cause all this? Let’s take a look at some of the highlights. You are now free to roam about the hardware First and foremost, we Pro Tools 9 users can now use whatever audio interface we want! No more Mbox dongles (unless you want one). Pro Tools 9 supports Avid and M-Audio interfaces, third-party Core Audio interfaces under Mac OS X, ASIO-compatible interfaces under Windows, or the internal audio engine of almost any computer. Don’t forget your iLok key, though. The software is authorized via iLok and if you remove it after the program boots up, it will randomly check to see if it’s still there. And by the way, the new black iLok keys hold a lot more licenses than the old blue ones at about half the size. Never too late Next up: latency. For years Pro Tools LE users had to deal with time adjuster plug-ins to compensate for latency. Thankfully, those days are gone forever. Automatic Delay Compensation is now standard. Now, one thing that’s important to remember—or to know if you’re new to this—is how Pro Tools 9 handles delay compensation. When a plug-in is inserted on a track, Pro Tools delays all the other tracks to compensate. If you have a plug-in on the lead vocal track that’s incurring 128 samples of delay, Pro Tools leaves the vocal track alone and adds that much delay to all the other tracks—that way all the audio tracks hit the finish line (the mix bus) at the same time. One important note here is that if you’re not using an Avid audio interface, and you use a hardware insert, Pro Tools won’t know the delay offset of the third-party interface to compensate for the delay. So, you’ll have to figure it out yourself. Run a ping or other sharp transient noise in and out of the I/O, record it, and measure the offset. Detectives on the case Multitrack Beat Detective is now standard—no more one track at a time for native-based Pro Tools users. Also, full import session data features are all enabled. Pro Tools HD users have enjoyed this for years, having the ability to import and apply all the settings of a track in one session to a track in a different session. ProTools LE users used to only be able to import the actual track, in addition to some other
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RECORDING MARCH 2011

Above: The Import Session Data window with all its options. Below: The Session Setup dialog.

Recording - March 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2011