Avid announced Pro Tools 12 and Pro Tools First, a free version of Pro Tools, at NAMM. The Noise Room caught up with Marketing Director Tony Cariddi, who walked through the new releases along with Avid Cloud Collaboration and new services on the Avid Marketplace.
Pro Tools First was built to get artists from idea to a finished song quickly, with recording, software instruments, and audio effects in one place. Players could round it out with AAX plug-ins and bundles from the Avid Marketplace as needed.
Pro Tools First has since been discontinued. Avid replaced it with Pro Tools Intro, which fills the same role as the free entry point into Pro Tools. Pro Tools Intro ships with 36 effects and instrument plugins built in, along with Splice integration for loops and samples, and it still supports Avid Cloud Collaboration for working with other artists and producers remotely. Sessions built in Pro Tools Intro carry over cleanly if a player later upgrades to a paid tier.
Pro Tools 12 introduced its own set of changes at the time, most notably a shift toward subscription-based licensing alongside the perpetual license Pro Tools had always offered. That mix has held: Pro Tools today is available through several subscription tiers as well as a perpetual license with an ongoing update plan, giving studios and individual players more than one way to buy in depending on how they work.
Pro Tools has kept moving since this appearance at NAMM. We covered Apple Silicon support arriving in Pro Tools and the free tier’s own story has shifted from Pro Tools First to Pro Tools Intro along the way. The core pitch behind Avid Cloud Collaboration, working on a session with someone who is not in the room, has only become more central to how the software gets used.
First off, I would like to say that I am a legitimate (paid) user. I purchased my Pro Tools rig 5 years ago, (back when the Pro Tools software came free with the hardware). I paid over $2,500 for my Digi 002 Console which came with Pro Tools 7 and a large bundle of plug-ins.
That said, the hardware has always worked great, but I have had nothing but problems with the software from day one. Pro Tools is the most UNSTABLE DAW platform in existence and I have spend over 100 hours on the phone with support troubleshooting various problems.
When it became clear and apparent that Digidesign had no intention of actually fixing the bugs in Pro Tools, they gave me a “courtesy upgrade” to Pro Tools 8. It’s important to understand that by doing this, they basically admitted that their product was crap.
Now, upgrading Pro Tools is no easy task and it actually left me in a WORSE situation with missing tracks, patches, plug-ins and corrupt files ect… And of course, Pro Tools 8 was plagued with it’s own issues and Avid has since 8 for 9 and then 9 for 10 and so on.
Now, I have serious issues with the pricing and licensing system of Pro Tools because I feel like I got burned and locked out in the darkness with a defective product that never worked. I want to upgrade, it’s going to cost me a lot of money and I just can’t justify giving Avid another dollar. It would be one thing if the software would just work out of the box perfectly as it’s intended, but how do you justify $700 price tag for buggy software?
What I like about Apple computers is how well the hardware and software integrate. Apple even stopped charging for Mac OSX and all Mac users automatically get the latest updates for free. This was a brilliant move because it keeps people using Mac and that translates into marketshare. AVID did the COMPLETE OPPOSITE with Pro Tools and decided that they were in the business of selling software. BUGGY software that has plagued me and thousands of users for nearly two decades.