Pro Tools 8

Posted by Joel Eaton on Monday 06 October 2008 at 3:23pm
Tags: audio editing | pro tools |

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With a sleeker GUI, and more bundled musical software, Digidesign appear to be stepping up to the challenge of providing an all in one music creation and post-production package.

Having previously stuck to its audio recording basis while competitors tapped in on the home production market, Pro Tools 8 is Digidesign's direct attempt to exploit the need of the home studio producer for a system complete for programming, recording, editing, mixing, mastering and post-production.

Digidesign are finally (albeit very slowly) letting go of their exclusive hold on Pro-Tools hardware. Further third party support for interfaces and controllers has been announced for the M-Powered version of Pro Tools 8, welcome progress, and good news for the critics.

There appears to be some nice new editing features, including a lock region to timeline function, a helpful tool for avoiding accidents, and an advanced automation layout. For the LE and M-Powered versions, the maximum number of channels has been increased to 48, and a new feature, Elastic Pitch, is introduced, which allows you to effortlessly manipulate or correct the pitch of any audio region in real time, right inside the Edit window.

There is a wealth of new instruments, including soft synths, a drum machine and 20 new effects. Also included is 8Gb of royalty-free audio loops in an obvious attempt to win over the more production orientated consumer.

There is a brief mention of new surround mixing capabilities (finally!), which is massively overdue and what promises to be a better MIDI editor, which has previously let Pro-Tools down.

Whether or not the new look interface will put off loyal users from upgrading straight away remains to be seen, as does the success of the attempt to lure home producers back to Pro-Tools (the cost will certainly play an important part in this). But it seems that Pro-Tools has finally caught onto where the music making industry is going, I only hope that by improving it's previous flaws and changing the interface it hasn't lost it's simplicity and ease of use which previously set it apart.

Although there's no mention of a release date yet, further details and a demo video of Pro-Tools 8 in action can be found here. Watch this space for a full product review in the near future.

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