Although Avid had bought Euphonix at this stage, the chances were that if you had invested in a serious worksurface for Pro Tools it was going to be Diginet based and the visual feedback through the use of colour which was so striking about the System 5 surfaces of the time was yet to propagate through the Pro Tools world to give us the power, deep integration and value of the S1 and Pro Tools Dock which offer S6-style power for Command 8 money. The faders in Pro Tools 10 look suspiciously like the faders from a D Control, a flagship control surface at the time. The modern fader caps in the Pro Tools UI are based on the design found on the Eucon control surfaces like the S6 and S1. One of the most striking things about Pro Tools 10 if you look at it today is those faders. So Pro Tools 10 was a world of real time bounces and memory limitations. 64 Bit freed Pro Tools of the restrictions of memory addressing 32 bit entailed, it’s hard to remember now but this was a big deal at the time and a fundamental issue with Pro Tools. Remember that prior to the AAE bounces in Pro Tools were real time! HDX users gained the ability to bounce up to 16 sources at the same time, Stem mastering of music projects was yet to become a ‘thing’ but for post production users this was very welcome indeed. The first thing which has to be said about Pro Tools releases beyond Pro Tools 10 is that they are 64 bit and feature a redesigned replacement for the old Digidesign Audio Engine, the Avid Audio Engine or AAE. Owners of TDM systems have to stay on this version as TDM support was dropped in Pro Tools 11. As such it has hung around for a long time. A weird release in that it was the crossover release which supported the new AAX format and the new HDX hardware as well as the old TDM hardware and RTAS plugins. It broke the requirement to use Avid hardware with Pro Tools - a huge change but transparent to me at the time with my Digidesign interface… Other releases are just as significant but leave the software looking much the same, Pro Tools 9 was such a release. Pro Tools 8 was a great example of the kind of feature-packed release we expect from an integer release. Integer Updates - Pro Tools 8, 9, 10, 11… Whether or not they are releasing enough often enough I’ll leave to you to comment on. This is in sharp contrast to the ‘little and often’ model Avid moved to when they adopted the current year-dot-month way of doing things in 2018. But usually the integer update was “the one”. There were point releases, and occasionally these were more memorable than their integer releases - I’m sure more of us who were around at the time remember Pro Tools 7.4 more than 7.0. Every two or so years a paid for upgrade was released, hopefully with a slew of compelling new features. The Pro Tools user of 2012 lived in a world of integer releases. I’ll head off the inevitable comments about perpetual licences. So what would a Pro Tools user of 2012 make of Pro Tools 2022.4? With the release of Pro Tools 11, in many ways the modern Pro Tools as we recognise it today came into being. This is significant because it marks the last days of what I see as the ‘Old’ Pro Tools and is the pivot point at which Pro Tools moved into its next phase. 10 years ago the current version of Pro Tools was Pro Tools 10.
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