Pro tools beta 10

As you adjust the gain from the default 0dB, a handy decibel label appears next to the fader icon, reporting the gain change that's been non-destructively applied. Better still, right-clicking the fader icon provides a series of related options, where you can clear or bypass the clip gain, or even render it to an audio file.

Both static and dynamic gain adjustments can now be made to clips. The upper clip has dynamic gain applied, while the lower clip has a static In addition to what Avid describe as 'static' clip gain, Pro Tools 10 also offers 'dynamic' clip gain. As you might be able to guess, dynamic clip gain allows you to have what is, in effect, gain automation within a specific clip.

This automation can be seen and edited by making the Clip Gain Line visible, whereupon you can use the pencil tool to create gain breakpoints, either by clicking to create single points, or dragging to draw multiple points. Once you've created additional points on the Clip Gain Line, the decibel label disappears from the clip.

However, what's particularly neat is that you can then click the clip's fader icon to trim the entire Gain Line. And, as well as using the on-screen fader, you can also 'nudge' the clip gain by a value specified in the Editing Preferences, using key commands, your mouse's scroll wheel, or a EUCON-compatible controller. If Avid had stopped there, clip gain would already be pretty indispensable, but the company's developers have gone a few steps further.

Not only is it possible to cut, copy, and paste clip gain settings between different clips, but Pro Tools HD and Complete Production Toolkit users can convert between clip gain settings and track volume automation. While competing applications have had the ability to apply per-clip gain settings for some time Nuendo had this feature on its release 10 years ago, for example , Avid's implementation is incredibly thorough, and should be welcomed by anyone who edits audio in Pro Tools.

To complement the new clip gain functionality and the new disk engine, clip fades in Pro Tools 10 are now calculated in real time, rather than having to be written and played back from disk. This is another welcome improvement, since it renders — no pun intended — the regeneration of fade files when you forget to copy the Fades folder a thing of the past. When Avid acquired Euphonix in , the company gained a great deal of expertise and technology relating to mixing consoles and control surfaces.

Although it had previously been possible to use Euphonix's products with Pro Tools, users had to resort to clunky workarounds involving Mackie's HUI protocol. So it was perhaps no surprise that Pro Tools 9, released towards the end of , incorporated native support for Euphonix's EUCON control surface protocol, making it much easier to control Pro Tools' mixer from Euphonix's Artist and Pro series products.

EUCON support has been further enhanced in Pro Tools 10, so that almost every Pro Tools command, such as those normally accessed via menus or keyboard shortcuts, can be assigned to the Soft Keys on your Euphonix surface.

Over commands are exposed, so you can now create and manage groups, for example, or adjust the edit selection without having to touch a keyboard or mouse. Another Euphonix-related improvement in Pro Tools 10 is the new Avid Channel Strip plug-in, which is based on the EQ and dynamics algorithms from the System 5 console's channel strip.

For those unfamiliar with the System 5 console, it's a high-end, modular digital console now sold by Avid, but originally released by Euphonix in Although the System 5 is popular in a many different fields, it has become a particular favourite for post-production work, being used to mix both the music and the final dub for major Hollywood feature films.

If you've watched a film in the last 10 years or listened to a film soundtrack , there's a good chance you'll have heard audio signals that have passed through a System 5 console. This may well be the last channel strip plug-in you'll ever need. Channel Strip comprises four sections — EQ, Filter, Dynamics and Volume — which can be arranged in almost any order you like, except that the filter always follows the EQ.

Each effect has its own section in the interface, which can be collapsed if you don't wish to see certain settings that might not be in use. The interface for the EQ and dynamics sections comprises tabs for each of the components of the given section, whether bands of EQ or specific dynamic processes. However, the dynamic section also offers an 'All' tab, so you can see all dynamics parameters on one page numerically, which is really handy. One particularly neat aspect of the Channel Strip plug-in is the Listen mode, which is available for the side-chain component of the dynamics section and each component of the EQ section.

Enabling Listen mode on the side-chain lets you hear the input signal, while clicking Listen on a given band or filter in the EQ section solos and inverts that band or filter so you only hear the affected frequencies.

This allows one to be incredibly surgical when trying to find the appropriate frequency and Q. In fact, that word pretty much sums up the System 5's channel strip. It's perfect for shaping a sound without adding a great deal of extra and perhaps unwanted colour. In addition to the new Channel Strip plug-in, there's also Down Mixer, which simplifies the process of creating stereo fold-downs of surround material, and a new version of Mod Delay.

But, as well as new plug-ins, Avid have also made a number of other mix-related improvements that will be helpful to those who use Pro Tools for large-scale mixes. There are now Solo and Mute indicators on the Edit window's toolbar, so if any track in your session has been soloed or muted, the appropriate indicator will light up to show that a solo or mute is active somewhere.

Clicking the Solo indicator will clear the solo status of any tracks, but, unfortunately, clicking the Mute indicator does nothing.

According to the Pro Tools manual, a 'clear mutes' function is impossible because Mute is an automatable mix parameter. Even so, it would have been nice if clicking the Mute indicator would at least scroll you automatically to the first muted track in the list, just to make it easy to track down a rogue mute, if you'll excuse the pun.

The Edit window now features Solo and Mute indicators bottom right. Here you can see the Solo indicator lit up to show that there's at least one soloed track in the session. A particularly neat touch is that the Solo indicator works across multiple Pro Tools systems synchronised via Satellite Link. This means that if a session on any linked system has a soloed track, the Solo indicator will light up, which is pretty cool. The only slight complaint is that the Solo and Mute indicators are only visible on the Edit window, and it might have been nice to find some way for them to be accommodated on the Mix window as well.

Staying with the theme of making things easier to see when mixing, another neat feature in Pro Tools 10 is called Bus Interrogation. While the name sounds a bit like some kind of forceful public transport inquisition, it's actually a way of quickly seeing all tracks sharing a common assignment. For example, say you have a number of tracks routed to a Drums bus and you want the Mix window to show only those tracks.

Simply right-click on an assignment to the Drums bus from a track output, for example and choose 'Show Only Assignments to Drums'. Any tracks not containing an assignment whether an input, output or send, and so on to the Drums bus will be hidden, clearing the Mix window of unnecessary clutter. When you want to return to the tracks that were visible before selecting this command, right-click on any assignment and choose 'Restore Previously Shown Tracks'.

The only small quirk is that the Mix window always ends up scrolled all the way to the left after the restoration. It would be nice to have the option of the Mix window being restored to the exact place to which you were previously scrolled. In addition to being able to show only the tracks sharing a common assignment, you can also choose to select the appropriate tracks, and there's also a Show Assignments command.

Unlike applications like Pro Tools, a driver can't run via Rosetta. It is important to make clear the fact that although Pro Tools itself can run on M1 Macs, at present it can only do so via Rosetta. Avid has also announced Apple Silicon support for the Avid Video Engine, which means that Video can now be played on Apple silicon-based machines, but please note that with Pro Tools There has been a significant upgrade to the way in which Pro Tools handles routing between signal paths of different channel widths in the new Flexible Track Routing features.

The process is now automatic both for Downmix and Fanout routing to narrower or wider destinations. The need for sub-paths is vastly reduced and this Downmix and Fanout intelligence comes with a level of customisation with user-adjustable coefficients for the LFE, sides and rears etc. Pro Tools Being able to search, filter and audition this massive library is useful if you are an NI user but this integration into Pro Tools is particularly interesting as it brings with it a degree of DAW control when used with a qualifying Native Instruments MIDI controller.

This is MIDI based control but is still welcome, particularly in advanced controllers like these which offer visual feedback on the hardware. Using any of the A Series, S Series or the M32 keyboard controllers users can now control multiple parameters including Transport controls, Mixer parameters including levels, pan, mute, solo and track banking.

Navigation around the Edit Window is possible including track and timeline selection and the encoder wheel can be used to move the playback position. The inclusion of a slew of new UI customisation options in Pro Tools This check box introduces changes to the UI which invokes colour changes which have been found to be helpful for users with a visual impairment with further tweaks are available through the newly expanded User Interface Customisation options including global colour control of Text and Lines, global control of backgrounds, the ability to put white borders around text fields and more.

This article is going to focus on the software, while next month's follow-up will cover the new HDX hardware and AAX plug-in format. Fortunately, the application remains compatible with Snow Leopard Windows users need to be running Windows 7 SP1.

Although the software will run on either or bit variants of Mac OS X and Windows, Pro Tools 10 is, to the dismay of many, still a bit application. This is slightly surprising given the climate into which Pro Tools 10 is being released, where many competitors have already introduced bit support, and there is clearly demand from users, especially by those using large, sample-based instruments.

However, Avid have at least planted the seed for bit support in Pro Tools 10, as we'll see in a moment. As is often the case with updates, many of the improvements are numeric, and Pro Tools 10 is no exception, with some users benefiting from increased numbers of voices, tracks and auxiliary input tracks.

Out of the box, Pro Tools 10 offers the same quantities as version 9 at However, with the addition of the Complete Production Toolkit, you now get voices up from , tracks up from , and aux input tracks up from Pro Tools HD users with an HD Core card get the same figures as with the Toolkit, except that the number of voices remains at , since this is hardware dependent — those with an HD Native card enjoy the same improvement of voices.

Those with the new Pro Tools HDX hardware get further benefits in this department, which we'll be investigating next month. The change that will have most impact is that regions are henceforth to be known as clips. So gone is the Regions menu: in its place, the Clips menu. Likewise, the Region List is now the Clips List.

Lastly, Avid have taken the opportunity to finally expel all traces of the Digidesign name from Pro Tools, including file names and paths. Fare thee well, Digidesign! While you might think it could require some effort to become aroused over Pro Tools 10 having a new disk engine, you would be wrong. All Pro Tools users will benefit from better performance when recording and playing back audio, but Pro Tools HD users and those with the Complete Production Toolkit are in for a particular treat.

In addition to support for Network and RAID storage systems, as well as enhanced support for Avid's own shared storage solutions, a new disk cache feature enables session audio files to be loaded into memory. This means that instead of the audio data being played back from disk, where it's stored, it is played back directly from memory. The advantage of playing back audio data from memory is speed. Playing back and locating different points within the session becomes perceptibly more responsive, since accessing the same data from disk will always be slower, even if you're using solid-state drives.

In fact, if all the audio in the current timeline is cached, playback and locating while playing back happens pretty much instantaneously. This will be particularly advantageous when working with large sessions, and especially useful for those running multiple Pro Tools systems in sync with each other, since the caching helps to reduce lock-up times.

To enable disk caching, you simply select a size for the cache in the Playback Engine Setup window. This size is set to 'Normal' by default, meaning that the disk playback basically works much as it did before, but you can activate disk caching by selecting an amount of memory to be used by the cache from the pop-up menu.

The amount of memory available for caching will be 3GB less than the memory installed in your Mac or 4GB less on Windows, due to differences in the OS , and can be set in 1GB increments after the initial and MB options. So if, like mine, your Mac has 16GB of memory, the maximum amount assignable for caching will be 13GB.

In practice, on my Mac, which was running Mac OS Since Pro Tools 10 is a bit application, you might be wondering how it's able to access memory beyond the usual bit boundaries. The answer is that it doesn't. Pretty neat. So if you need to free up some memory on your computer while using the disk cache, you'll need to reduce the amount of allocated memory.

Once disk caching is active, the Activity section of the System Usage window will display two additional metrics: Disk Cache and Timeline Cached. The Disk Cache meter shows how much of the cache is used, while Timeline Cached indicates how much of the audio in the current Timeline is stored in the cache.

In an ideal world, the Timeline Cached value should be percent, and the Disk Cache a little lower; but you will still see benefits even if you don't have enough memory to accommodate an entire session in the cache. However, I think most people will be surprised by how little memory you actually need to store an entire Timeline in the cache. For example, the demo song supplied with Pro Tools 10 uses only four percent of a 12GB cache. A small improvement when setting up the disk cache would be if Pro Tools could tell you how much memory would be required to cache the current Timeline in the Playback Engine window.

Even though it's a global setting, rather than session-specific, it would still be helpful, since Pro Tools only allows one session to be loaded at a time anyway. Overall, though, disk caching is a brilliantly obvious way to improve the performance of audio playback in Pro Tools. We tend to forget that in the early days of audio software, the only reason for recording directly to disk was because computers didn't have the memory capacity to store enough audio to be useful.

When Pro Tools was released in , for example, a Quadra typically shipped with 4MB memory — enough for less than one minute of mono, CD-quality audio.

But with modern systems having between 4GB and 64 GB of memory, redressing the balance between memory and disk usage seems like a sensible way forward. Another apparently humble feature that may nevertheless have users reaching for the Champagne is that you can now change the gain of individual regions — sorry, I mean clips — without having to resort to automation, which is tremendously useful.

By making the Clip Gain Info visible, the gain of a clip can be adjusted with a click on the fader icon that appears in the bottom left of a clip. As you adjust the gain from the default 0dB, a handy decibel label appears next to the fader icon, reporting the gain change that's been non-destructively applied. Better still, right-clicking the fader icon provides a series of related options, where you can clear or bypass the clip gain, or even render it to an audio file.

Both static and dynamic gain adjustments can now be made to clips. The upper clip has dynamic gain applied, while the lower clip has a static In addition to what Avid describe as 'static' clip gain, Pro Tools 10 also offers 'dynamic' clip gain. As you might be able to guess, dynamic clip gain allows you to have what is, in effect, gain automation within a specific clip. This automation can be seen and edited by making the Clip Gain Line visible, whereupon you can use the pencil tool to create gain breakpoints, either by clicking to create single points, or dragging to draw multiple points.

Once you've created additional points on the Clip Gain Line, the decibel label disappears from the clip.