Digidesign Pro Tools 8 (Mac/Win) Review

May 1, 2009 12:00 PM, By Eli Crews

           
 

PRO TOOLS GETS A MAKEOVER AND THEN SOME

Among DAWs, Pro Tools is a ubiquitous behemoth. From M-Powered to LE to HD, Pro Tools is the software you're most likely to find running in studios of all sizes. A major upgrade like version 8 is always enough to get the whole pro audio community abuzz with excitement, and this reviewer is certainly no exception. New features include user-interface enhancements, integrated score and MIDI editors, new Elastic Audio functions, a sizable loop collection, 20 all-new effects plug-ins, 4 all-new software instruments, and more.

Bonus Material

Bonus Material: A Fistful of Plug-Ins

More Information on Included Plug-Ins and Effects

Mix March 2009 Review on Pro Tools 8

Demo of Boom Virtual Instrument

Demo of New Playlist View

Demo of New MIDI Editor Feature

Video Demo of Pro Tools 8 Features

Remix Video Walk-Through, Part 1

Remix Video Walk-Through, Part 2

Remix Video Walk-Through, Part 3

Remix Video Walk-Through, Part 4

Gray Is the New Black

My first task was to install Pro Tools LE 8 on my studio's 8-core 2.8 GHz Mac Pro. I received my update information by email, which prompted me to log in to Digidesign's user area. I entered the activation code and downloaded the 4.1 GB application installer, which includes several software instruments and sample libraries. Installation was straightforward and speedy, and I didn't need to have a previous version already installed.

The most noticeable difference in Pro Tools 8's graphical user interface is the color scheme, which now emphasizes shades of gray. In the Mix window, you can color code each full channel strip using the color-palette preferences. In the Mix and Edit windows, moving tracks around is significantly easier, because brilliant yellow highlights indicate their new locations. Bus and I/O assignments are also highlighted when you change them.

Other GUI improvements include knobs for panning (instead of sliders), more-detailed metering in the Mix window, multiple lanes of automation data per track in the Edit window, and more-customizable (and recallable) window configurations. The new Universe view allows you to navigate your entire session from a miniature overview in the Mix window. My only gripe is that it's harder to see the difference between active and inactive tracks.

Not Just Another Pretty Face

FIG. 1: With an updated GUI and loads of new features and plug-ins, Pro Tools 8 changes the face of Digidesign’s powerful DAW software. The new Playlists Track view speeds up the comping process.

Pro Tools 8 has loads of new features, as evidenced by the 131-page PDF What's New in Pro Tools. It's impossible to tackle them all in this review, so I'll focus on the most important ones. Pro Tools LE and M-Powered now have 48 simultaneous stereo or mono tracks, which you can expand to as many as 128 mono or 64 stereo tracks using one of three optional Toolkits ($395 to $1,995). Although that's quite a few more tracks than the previous version, non-HD users still don't get automatic delay compensation. You can have up to ten inserts per channel, twice as many as before. You can sweep the mouse over multiple tracks in the Track List to show or hide them.

One of my favorite new features is the Playlists Track view, which displays each playlist in its own lane below the main playlist (see Fig. 1). A new key command for copying a selection from an alternate playlist to the main playlist makes comping much, much easier. The key commands Shift + S, Shift + M, and Shift + R now solo, mute, and record enable the currently selected track or playlist. Another handy new feature: Command + Option + Z (Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + Z (Win) now restores your last selection if you accidentally deselect a region or section of the timeline.

The new Elastic Pitch function lets you change pitch in a recorded track on a region-by-region basis. You manually select the notes you'd like to change and then type the plus or minus value (in semitones or cents) in a dialog box. You'll start to hear artifacts if you go too far up or down, but it works quite well within a semitone or two.

The only feature that took a backward step is the Export Tracks dialog box. Parameters that don't apply aren't sufficiently grayed out, making it hard to see what attributes your export will have. In addition, Export Tracks doesn't default to the last-used folder like it used to when you click on the Choose button.

A.I.R.-Plugs

One of the upgrade's most exciting aspects is its new plug-in bundle. Although many of these plug-ins deliver the same capabilities that other major platforms have had for years — automatic panning, a real-time multitap delay, and multiple reverbs, for example — the sheer number of them is impressive, and they all sound really good (see the online bonus material at emusician.com). The various distortion processors are real standouts. Bomb Factory/Tech21 SansAmp, for instance, sounds remarkably like my beloved SansAmp PSA-1 rackmount unit. A.I.R. Frequency Shifter is a Bode modulator that's similar to a ring modulator but with more control. I also liked A.I.R. Stereo Width, a powerful yet simple-to-use M-S encoder/decoder with several useful modes. Other notable additions are A.I.R. Spring Reverb, A.I.R. Talkbox, and TL Metro, a feature-laden alternative to the standard Click plug-in.

FIG. 2: Boom, one of four new virtual instruments, is a drum machine with a very intuitive interface.

In addition to the effects and utility plug-ins, Pro Tools 8 comes with four new virtual instruments, a previous one (Structure Free), and an updated one, all developed by A.I.R. (Advanced Instrument Research, a company under the Digidesign umbrella). Xpand!2, which blends sampling and synthesis, updates Digidesign's unique instrument plug-in. Mini Grand (piano), DB-33 (Hammond organ), Boom (drum machine; see Fig. 2), and Vacuum (virtual analog synthesizer) are all totally new. They all sound great and come in handy, especially for those of us without large software instrument libraries. The only problem I encountered is that DB-33 introduced crackly glitches running at 96 kHz, but it ran fine at lower sampling rates.