I am drawing on my experience with Protools and other DAWs Mark. This isn't a personal thing or a statement about what it takes to make a good record. It's a statement about what makes a good DAW. A lot of people out there hear the word Protools tossed about and love to slam it because it's out of their price range and because they think they can buy a $400 software package to run on their home PC and waalaa, their dream DAW is born. This is simply not the case. I don't work for Digidesign. If their product was garbage you can believe I'd be onto the next great thing.

Pro Tools didn't become popular cause it ever "sounded good". Digidesign did a kick ass job of marketing and we all know how we Americans react to a good advertising campaign.
I have seen more Protools setups in the Film Industry for editing and now mixing Television than ever. As my colleagues and I would always say:"why not use Protools...it's Television and no dick head from Iowa(just an example) will for a moment take out a pen and pencil and rave about the horrible sound job on Angel(another example(mixed on PT)and send a burning letter to the Post House. It just doesn't matter. I personally feel a Record Project deserves the most organic, non-f..ked with process available. Why? Because it is a static fixture. Something that will be frozen for eternity much like a painting. If a product f..ks with the sound in any way via processing, etc...don't use it! Same goes for doing a take till you find it's perfection. Save the flaws for a live performance(if any). Having said this, I don't know why PT became so popular among the Recording purists. Maybe the ability to fix,stretch, edit, etc.Frankly, I don't care. I've never found it necessary to alter the end result of a well planned, produced Record Project. If it's done properly you just do your overdubs and mix and master the f..ker. BTW, even 64bit internal processing messes with the original sound. And worse than this is the result of taking your tracks from one format and moving them all over the place till you're done. Real stupid. That's all I have to say. This thread kind of bothers me. Too bad about Kevin Garnett's heart. By 10PM Pacific time tomorrow night it will be breaking.

Whew for a minute there I thought those marketing fiends at Digidesign had fooled you into thinking they had a decent product Anaconda. I'm so glad you got them figured out. And I'm inclinded to agree, digital recording or so called DAWs just f-ck with the sound too much. In fact, I think analog tape also f-cks with the sound too damn much. All that wow and flutter. These man made devices just aren't organic enough. Which is why I'm working on a recording system made entirely from recycled wood pulp. No electricity involved, it works by foot pump. Now I just need to find a way to market it.

Yeah, I just read this more closely. I agree that Pro Tools not supporting interleaved files is a nuisance (it deinterleaves them, then uses a stereo track, and it can bounce to stereo files). Other programs that were written more recently can open stereo files directly.

However, the view resolution criticism is hard to understand. You can use "memory locations" to jump instantly to whatever resolutions you want (single samples or hours - it doesn't matter), there are five stored horizontal zoom resolutions accessible right on the top of the Edit window, you can click on arrows on to of the window to zoom in either direction, or you can use key commands to zoom in and out horizontally or vertically. There's also a command to fill the screen with the selection.

And you can edit down to the single sample, so I really don't see that the precision would be greater on any DAW.

I do wish there was a key command to change the track sizes, though, so perhaps that's what you mean.

Justin. What's this talk 'bout wow and flutter? I tracked my lastest project at Ocean Way(Studio B-API) in Hollywood on their tweaked Ampex ATR-124.No wow or flutter. This is the purity I mentioned. I then transferred the tracks through DB-Gold AD's to a MX 2424 hard drive. I also did a safety directly to the MX 2424 using it's convertors. I chose the analog transfer. It's about as "organic" as I have heard...The wood sounds like wood.The cymbals sound quite real. I wouldn't think of moving to any other media to edit. Especially Pro Tools. You see, I had to use Pro Tools for 5 years. Now I'm free.Do you have wood Justin...Bet you do with all the stroking with this ProTools thread. I think you need to get out more often. Maybe a long walk in the woods. Breathe deep. **** on a tree. Have some fun. BTW, thanks for keeping this Forum active.

Justin, I didn't use ProTools because of the Digidesign politic!!!
In early 1995 I bought the first Audiomedia III in my country from the PT distributor after it's presentation. They give it with Session Software, something like Session8, but for Audiomedia. They told us that it is only matter of time to give us new soft for the card (for free!!) because this soft was only 8 channels, without plugs, etc (it was 1995:-)) to make stable drivers (the driver for NT was 1.0 till the end of the card!!! and was fulduplex!!!), to make ASIO, and more, and more. Justin, if you have been on Digidesign forums these years, you know that the response from the users was... They were starting the posts with: The f.....ing Digi :-) This situation was 3 YEARS!!!!! Tell me, how a normal person will wait 3 years for support of his card? The card itself is very good, for me it's sound is better than the sound of M-box, but without software support it is nothing. The truth behind this fact is that nobody in the company was interested in the what you say pro-sumer market. They wanted only to sell hi-end systems for lots of money.
But time changed, there are fast computers with native plug-ins, and Digi realized that native software is in more adequate situation. So they started to offer M-box, Digi001, 002, PTLE and so on. Now the drivers are compatible with Audiomedia, I can use with it PTLE, but I can't wait until now, I bought Cubase, RME and DA7. It's not about the money. I think that if a man or a company is not correct to me once, he (or it) can do it again.
And about the money. PT is veeeeery overpriced. Check their pricelist. Check the price of one single Y-cable! What is it? Maybe it is pure gold metal:-)
And about the DSP-cards. IT was very elegant solution when computers were on 75 mHZ, more than this, this was the ONLY solution. But now for me it doesn't matter if the CPU of the computer or the farm card is making the computing, computing is computing in both cases, it is not worst or better, and the sound behind the digits is the same. The mixing engine does matter, of course, but in my opinion, PT is not the only one good alternative for mixing. Sorry for the english:-(

Keyplayer: I think the term you're looking for is Voila. C'est francais, n'est pas?

Justin. Re read Anaconda's last post 20 times. Maybe it will serve as some sort of intervention for your brainwashing. And by all means take a long walk in the woods. Your dangerously close to the Nike Headquarters and your first pair of black Nike's. Next thing you know you and about 40 other brainwashed blow tools numb nuts will be taking off for a comet. The next one is called Avid bop.

Man, I've been trying to stay out of this rant for a while, but someone said something that I should've stated days ago...

Digi's support? If you can call it that, it only exists for the highend users. I owned an AMIII also. I am not a Digi outsider - I sold the gear for years, went to Digi training seminars and events (that they were good enough to pay for), and kept asking all the while: where are my stable drivers for this card? You see, I hate the PT software - it sucks. Nuff said, its all a matter of preference and I won't argue that with anyone. But I use Logic, and at the time was on Windows. Three, four years went by, and still nada. They would tell me, "any day now", and the days kept passing by....

Well, I shelved the card when I picked up a 2408. It sat in this machine or that, but never got any use. Eventually, I picked up a Quicksilver and then an iBook. Dropped my vs880 which I used for composition and bought an MBox. I dreaded buying it, but it was the only thing out at the time that did what it did except for the MiniME and being the poor sod that I am, didn't have the bucks for that.

Many months later, I was kicking myself for buying the piece of **** because there was no stable driver for third party software. Not even on OS9. In the end, I had to spend more money to purchase a liscence for a third party driver ( Propogamma) which still wasn't bulletproof, but at least worked most of the time. When I switched to OSX, I had to endure further waits of multiple months for a driver that worked on it. In fact, this delayed my entry into X for more than six months.

Yeah, I know what your saying - had a bought a core system, that wouldn't have been a problem. But I say to you, customer support is customer support. I will never buy another Digi product as long as I live (I hope - if I do, I have no one but myself to blame).

My list of gripes with Digi goes on further, but I won't bore you with it. A lot of them have been enumerated by others. I couldn't let that go, though, as I finally dropped my MBox on ebay last week and am happily using a Firewire 410 now, with no problems and an extra USB port to spare. And about 20$ in my pocket from the difference in cost. Thanks Digi, for years of broken productivity and aggravation.

Out.