DigiDesign Kit and Tools Have a Lot to Offer
In the world of multi track recording, the DigiDesign Pro Tools kit has long dominated as the top of the line product in this market. The reasons for that dominance are many. This particular suite leads the competition in audio editing features that are state of the art. This forward thinking design combined with top quality machinery and outstanding support of plug and play devices makes DigiDesign Pro a leader in audio editing technology.
If there is a criticism some users of the DigiDesign kit have noticed, it is that compared to comparable packages, the MIDI features seem to be less well developed than the competition. The design team that put this package together seemed to be playing catch up in the MIDI features part of their product offerings and that is still a weakness in an otherwise strong product.
The way that the designers at DigiDesign have chosen to fix the shortcomings in the product is with the release of the Pro Tools LE package. Pro Tools brings up the MIDI functionality for the DigiDesign product significantly and makes it competitive in the market with other products that had been ahead of them in this feature function. But in almost every respect, the most recent enhanced release level for the Pro Tools package has improved the DigiDesign product line across the board.
The "horse power" of DigiDesign with the Pro Tools kit has been ramped up considerably making it able to do a lot more work for it's users. The ways that the Pro Tools kit accomplished these improvements including increasing the increasing the time per track from five seconds to ten seconds. The quantity of available buses to carry the load has been doubled to 32 as well, which is essential when users are editing complex music creations using the DigiDesign tools. Further, the memory locations available to editors of music has been vastly expanded from 200 to 999 locations. These improvements make the package much more powerful especially compared to previous editions of the product.
This newest version of the DigiDesign Pro Tools kit uses a different format for saving files that is called PTF. The good thing about this new format is that when you save files using the new version, it is easy to pick them out in a full directory of work. However, the new format is not compatible with older versions of the software. If you have some work that you have done with the newest version of Pro Tools that you want to share with a friend or customer that has the older version of the package, you would have to load it up and save it as the older format. But Pro Tools does support that ability to make backward compatible file versions.
While changing file formats is a hard thing to get used to, it offers much more complexity of editing and saving what you do to the DigiDesign package. The new file format version also makes it much easier for completed work that you do to be cross compatible between windows and Mac platforms. That is important if you are editing music that will be submitted as part of a promo kit or to be evaluated by a label. You want your work to be as flexible as possible when it goes out there to represent you professionally.
Along with the other expanded features that DigiDesign Pro Tools has brought to the market, a new instrument track feature gives editors a lot of flexibility in using the tool to mix their recordings. This makes it much easier to set up an instrumental track separate from the other parts of the recording. Before this newest version of Pro Tools, it took some manipulation to add an instrumental track to a recording. But this new feature makes that an easy step, which will vastly improve the ability of editors to make their recordings sound more professional.
DigiDesign Pro Tools has put at the fingertips of the user the ability to take advantage of a lot of editing features very easily. Such editing functions as duration, delay, velocity, quantization and transposition are easy to manipulate and balance. Previous versions of the product were harder to use because these functions were not so well designed. But using an on-screen real time properties view window that puts everything the editor needs in one panel that is easy to monitor and change on the fly.
Region editing has also been streamlined in this version of DigiDesign Pro Tools as well. Region groups is a methodology the tool set uses to allow editors to combine regions from a track or even from various tracks and group them up so that editing can be done simultaneously. The menu system of Pro Tools now allows users to find MIDI files to drag and drop into the editing process that are residing in directories that are not part of the DigiBase system. The toolkits ability to accommodate more audio file types has been expanded including support for Acid and REX files. All of these enhancements make DigiDesign Pro Tools more flexible, easy to use and able to accommodate a wider variety of editing needs than ever before.
It used to be that the process of editing sound clips was a complicated and sophisticated undertaking, which required that you pretty much had to depend on the expertise of professional sound editors at a hefty price tag. And since so much of the final "product" happens during editing, that reduces the ability of an artist to have control over how his or her recording sounded and was presented to record producers or those who could have a big influence over their career.
DigiDesign Pro Kit has made it possible for much of the "work" of producing a quality edit of an audio clip to be done form one, easy to understand console. Professional resources are a mouse click away and the process can be put at the fingertips of those who also work on the creative side of the audio industry. While there is plenty of competition for MIDI sound editing, the latest versions of DigiDesign Pro Tools has made it a real contender in this marketplace.
Filed Under: VoiceOvers
