'industry standard' DAW

[Alperian]

In my other lives I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. For putting together a magazine (SOS) there is no better than QuarkXpress or InDesign. I am sure your printers use one or the other

These are "industry standards"

What can Pro Tools do that Ableton Live cannot? I am baffled. I can see that folks would choose Logic if they had a new Mac to hand, but why not Sonar, Reason or Cubase?

Why bloody Pro tools? The reviewers just let us graze in the meadows of DAW county on whatever we feel like, just commenting on the merits of the latest upgrade.

I would like reviewers to put Avid, or whoever deserves it and whoever is currently at the top - UNDER PRESSURE.

If you are the industry standard, you should be judged and marked to a higher standard than others.

[S1GNL]

You cannot compare DAWs to other "art creation" tools in your "other lives".

The pieces of software you have mentioned have been created as tools for specific tasks. A DAW is a collection of tools for different music production stages: multi-track recording, MIDI editing/ controlling internal and external soundsources, audio editing, mixing, ...

ProTools has been originally an audio editing software, which developed to a multi-track recording audio software in a later stage. MIDI functions were introduced in a later version!
Cubase and Logic, were MIDI sequencer "only" software pieces. Audio recording/ editing functions were added in later versions!
Reason was a "closed system" for production and creation, not a real DAW - audio recording and editing has been introduced in a different software from Propellerheads: Record. Both tools were merged later to what is today called Reason.

As you can see the vendor's approaches were different in the early stages - to get and keep their users, they started to add all the functions to their nowadays called DAWs which were missing, but offered/ included in other products.

The reason why ProTools is a "industry standard" is because all mixing engineers which are the "stars" and "hot shots" today, giving their SOS interviews and YouTube tutorials and plug-in reviews and tips, started mixing music in the 90's and earlier. So they started working on ProTools in the digital domain and kept to it. That is also a reason why you'll find it in most studios. These are not all reasons, but I think the most important ones.

But reading interviews with mixing engineers who are also producing, you often can read, that they switch to other DAWs like Logic, Cubase, Live and so on for their "music creation" purposes. You can also read stuff like "Yeah, I'm mxing these tracks in my ProTools session from Artist X, who wrote this synth-line in Logic blah blah".

So "industry standard" is not meaning "the best tool for this purpose". My opinion...

I am using Studio One, by the way. There are still things about it I really hate, like the channel f****-up, everytime I change the order on the console, or the automation editig, which really need some improvements. But I got used to it, and there are many things about it I love. So I keep it!

[Zukan]

There is no industry standard DAW.

PT used to grace every studio and was the defacto DAW for audio but not anymore. The others have caught up and most of the TDM plugins are now available in other formats.

I have used all of the DAWs and am very happy with Cubase at the moment. Reaper is lovely too and Ableton has made huge strides forward and is the go to DAW for hip hop heads.

[Hugh Robjohns]

In my other lives I use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. For putting together a magazine (SOS) there is no better than QuarkXpress or InDesign. I am sure your printers use one or the other

We use Indesign and send PDFs to the printers.

These are "industry standards"

For many professional industry users, yes, they are certainly very common tools. But they aren't the only professional desktop publishing platforms. There are several others, and for semi-pro and home users there are a very large number of alternatives.

The same is true of DAWs. There are a few 'heavyweights' that have been around since the dawn of the DAW, and many others that have come along since.

Why bloody Pro tools?

It was around at the start (initially as Sound Tools), and it developed quickly. It's manufacturers also offered a complete hardware interface package to support it, which appealed to pro-users. And let's not ignore the company's marketing profile: if you tell people it's "the industry standard" often enough, they'll eventually believe you!

The reality is that there is no one 'industry standard', and not least because the 'industry' has a very wide ranging requirements. PT is quite dominant in music production, but certainly not exclusively so. Music creation in high-end professional circles is often done in Logic or Nuendo/Cubase, or any of several other platforms, depending on genre and personal preferences.

In mastering, SADiE and Sequoia are the dominant tools. In broadcast production it's SADiE, Pyramix and Reaper (at least in the UK)....

Going back twenty years, the different DAWs had quite different feature sets and facilities, and thus tended to be more practical and easier to use for some tasks than others. for example, Sound Tools (and then PT) had no or only minimal MIDI facilities, while Cubase was great on the MIDI front, but had very poor audio editing tools. However, everything evolves, and these days almost all the DAW platforms are tending to converge into a common form with almost identical toolsets, facilities and features. And that will probably continue over the next decade.

In then end, people will use the DAW they feel most comfortable using, or because of their history and ntellectual investment with a platform, or because the computer OS restricts their options, or because of their employer's commercial preferences... But they will all do pretty much the same things in broadly the same ways.

We've seen it all before! Back in the early 1940s lots of different manufacturers started making tape recorders, but they all did it differently. Different tape speeds, different equalisations, different head alignments, some laced the tape with the oxide out, some with it on the inside. Some ran the tape left to right and others went the other way! But within twenty years they pretty much all worked the same way, with a properly defined small subset of speeds, equalisations, operating levels, tape lacing, control layouts, and so on. Anyone could load and operate a Studer, or Ampex, or Teac/Tascam, or Magnetophone, or Nagra, and use them without any confusion -- which wasn't the case thirty years earlier!

The same applies to mixing consoles too. The early analogue consoles varied in their layouts and configurations enormously, but quickly adopted a pretty standard channel path layout and overall structure. The invention of the in-line console and then the digital console shook things up for a while, but again the formats have quickly settled to a fairly consistent arrangement so that the user's skills are quite easily transferrable between the consoles of different manufacturers without too much confusion.

For students hoping to enter the industry, I'd strongly advise becoming as familiar as possible with as many different DAWs as possible. The notion that you only need to know about "the industry standard ProTools" is very likely to bite you firmly on the behind when you apply for jobs and find a potential employer uses Fairlights or Digital Performer.... Moreover, there are no 'jobs for life' anymore, and most people will end up moving regularly between different employers on short term contracts, and this have to work with different DAWs and be expected to know their way around and get jobs done quickly and skilfully from the get-go. A potential employer won't be impressed by anyone sitting blankly in front of Nuendo, saying, "... But I've got a certificate for ProTools 101!"

As for reviewers holding the manufacturers up to scrutiny, I think we do exactly that at SOS, and we have influenced many manufacturers to change and improve things over the years...

H

[Jake Knott]

Absolutely concur with Hugh; we're currently advertising a studio post which requires skill with either Reaper, Cubase or Audition. Pro Tools doesn't even get a look in I'm afraid!

Jake

[Jack Ruston]

Yes this is all totally dependent on the environment and genre in which you are working.

If you were looking for jobs working as an assistant for an EDM producer you'd be quite unlikely to need much PT knowledge - more Logic and Ableton....maybe some rudimentary PT stuff if you had to prep sessions for a mixer.

Composers almost always seem to be on Logic or Cubase

Mastering...Sadie, Pyramix, Sequoia etc

BUT it's true to say that if you're looking for work in the music recording side of the industry, working in studios, or for most of the currently 'busy' producers, and certainly mixers, you need to know Pro Tools. There are lot of studios, many of the 'big' ones, that only really run PT. They might have all sorts of DAW's installed on their systems that other people have stuck on there at some stage, but they don't always have the licences up and running (people come in with them on iLoks or whatever), and their hardware is Avid HD hardware - It will work over Core Audio or ASIO but it's limited. It's not designed for use in that way. If a studio like that is going to consider hiring you for sessions day to day, you must know Pro Tools. You don't have to know it back to front but you do need to know how it works.

Why? Well as discussed above, as DAW's have developed, different sides of the industry have gravitated towards the software that made the greatest progress in functions that were important to them early on....So people who were working with external midi hardware, programming and sequencing got really into Logic and sometimes Cubase. You could not (or could barely) record audio on them (although you could run logic as a front end for pro tools mix systems) but the midi side was, and is, really developed. What studios needed from Pro Tools was something that could reliably record a given number of audio tracks, with no, or very little noticeable latency. And PT did that when what became the other main DAW's these days could not. So many people learned it right from the start, why would they change? It's a very mature and well-developed system, and although people love to complain that Avid can be slow to update, or that it doesn't have X or Y feature that eg Reaper has, most very experienced Pro Tools users find that there are just one too many things missing whenever they try to jump ship. Unfortunately none of these things, PT included is by any means the perfect choice, and that picture is now less clear than ever, with every DAW offering some clever functionality.

Over time its possible that PT's grip will lessen further in these sorts of music - specific environments. I can see a time when laptops are so powerful that people will just bring in their own DAW and hook it up to the house converters with no barrier to doing so. But for the time being there does need to be 'a standard' for continuity. If it wasn't going to be pro tools, it would have to be one of the others. And there's no advantage in that.

J

[Hugh Robjohns]

All good insight, but I'd offer two additional thoughts.

While it can be argued very easily that PT dominates music studio work, music studio work doesn't dominate the pro audio industry! Relatively few people entering 'the industry' today will find regular work in professional music studios, simply because there just aren't that many of them around any more. Moreover, there are a lot of very experienced people out there all competing for the same work too.

However, there are a lot of jobs (mostly short term contract stuff, sadly) in radio and TV broadcasting, film, theatre, live sound, commercial and corporate, and so on. And as detailed earlier, the preferred DAW standards here are as varied as the work.

So yes, by all means become familiar and competent with PT but please, please, not to the exclusion of everything else. The wider the experience, expertise and knowledge of different DAW platforms, the more employable you become, and in such a highly competitive marketplace as we now have (over 3000 Music-Tech graduates flood the market every single year in the UK!), that's really, really important!

And secondly, regarding 'standards for continuity'. Rather than an 'industry standard DAW', what we really need is an industry standard format for DAW information.

We already have an industry standard audio format, which is WAV (although BWAV would be better) -- and absolutely every DAW can already read a bunch of raw WAV audio files, regardless of the DAW used to record them. This matches the model we had in the days of analogue tape, where a tape could be recorded on a Studer or Tascam, and played back on an Ampex or Magnetophone without any problems.

What we need next -- and there are already some quite well conceived moves in this direction from the AES and others -- is a common DAW Project format that contains universally compatible instructions for crossfades, automation, plugin details, routing, and so on. Ideally, a project file from one DAW should be recognised and loadable into any other DAW, with the track layout, edits, fades, routing and plugin allocation all being re-established automatically. Of course, it is inevitable that a few specialised and custom features might have to be omitted or reduced to a simpler common default mode, but that would be a huge step forward in the genuine interoperability that the industry as a whole really needs.

H

[Jack Ruston]

That would be VERY useful at this point. My only reservation is that I think it's a good time for DAWs to break out of the typical mould - There's less and less reason to stay tied into the analogue paradigm, and it'd be a shame if conforming to some sort of cross-host protocol for audio tracks etc discouraged the sort of thinking that might allow DAWs to operate in new and exciting ways, nature unknown (by me)

J

EDIT - Not that I'm desperate for some sort of added functionality - I'm not! It's just exciting to think of where things could go for DAW's perhaps in conjunction with VR etc etc.

[The Elf]

The main reason that PT was the 'industry standard' for a while was because poeple *said* it was the 'industry standard'. Digidesign wanted it to be true, and anyone with their time and training invested in it wanted it to be true - and so it did become true for a generation.

I recall being lectured by a 'name' guitarist over how I should use PT, because it was the 'industry standard' - then he saw how quickly I got the results for him with my own choice of DAW. It was the last time we had that conversation...

[Jack Ruston]

Well...it's not a question of people just 'saying' that it was the standard - it was pretty much the only game in town. In the 90's if you wanted a DAW that could record lots of tracks of audio and behave 'like a tape machine', which is what people wanted as a replacement for both tape, and hardware digital multitracks, what else was available? It was the right product at the right time. And in those Digidesign days they really nailed a lot of the functional stuff. And of course it had dedicated DSP for processing at a time when that actually meant something. It's easy to forget now because it's relatively expensive, that it was CHEAP. A few thousand dollars compared with cost of some of those early digital hardware systems which cost about the same as a holiday home. The midi was bad when it came along, and even now it's average at best, but there's little to touch it for audio recording and mixing. There are some better individual features in some DAW's, and more efficiency eg in Reaper...but overall, as a whole package it's the most developed on the audio side. It's not perfect, and Avid are frustrating. It's not the 'best' for everything, or every day, but it's easy to see why it has gained that reputation as a standard. It was never only a question of marketing.

J

[The Elf]

Well...it's not a question of people just 'saying' that it was the standard - it was pretty much the only game in town.

There were always alternatives. Even the humble Atari Falcon gave 8 tracks of audio. What PT gave was scalability and stability. That was a genuine advantage. It actually didn't take too long for others to catch up.

but there's little to touch it for audio recording and mixing.

I have to disagree. I think it remains clumsy and clunky. Just a matter of preference, of course!

[Jack Ruston]

There were always alternatives. Even the humble Atari Falcon gave 8 tracks of audio. What PT gave was scalability and stability. That was a genuine advantage. It actually didn't take too long for others to catch up.

Well, 8 tracks wasn't enough though was it...I mean people wanted lots of tracks, non-linear editing, and a proper 'mixer' with plug in processing. I came to it in about 96 or so and I can't remember there really being another practical option if you basically liked DAW's rather than digital recorders, and you wanted plenty of guaranteed audio tracks and processing. I mean, what were the options? I'm genuinely asking. The music recording industry voted with its wallet and then it doesn't really matter how quickly computers caught up with dedicated DSP because by then a lot of people knew and liked pro tools. Why change? But you know, I don't see HDX as some sort of nirvana - it actually has some frustrating limitations vs Pro Tools on the host, but it can do something which nothing else can do...STILL...after all these years...you can multitrack a band on HDX with effectively zero-latency cues, but running through the mixer - you can therefore punch in on the tracks that you're monitoring. There are clunky workarounds with native systems, but it's proving hard to break that 3ms barrier if you have to run through Core Audio or ASIO drivers. Of course it WILL be gone - it'll be nothing at some stage in the future, but at the moment there is still that advantage with HDX. I don't personally feel like I need to have that, but I can see why studios buy it - its nice convenience...I mean it's just not that expensive in the big scheme of things.

I have to disagree. I think it remains clumsy and clunky. Just a matter of preference, of course!

Yeah of course - fair enough

[muzines]

Agree with Jack - back in the 90s, you could do audio tracking on a computer, but it wasn't a great experience - and those that did it, professionally, requiring largish track counts and largish simultaneous recording track counts were mostly doing with with PT and PT hardware.

That's not to say there weren't other systems (Ensoniq's Paris had quite a few ardent supporters, for instance) but for the rest of us, it wasn't feasible to track 24-channels at once, dropping in on the fly, and having zero latency, all in a fairly solid package - and that's what PT did for studios, back then.

The situation is different today, but that's how PT got there, and people like to stick with work works for them until it doesn't.

I also think PT is clunky these days, and was *really* lagging behind in features until the last couple of years, but these days, it doesn't matter what you use - but some knowledge of PT is good to have if you are moving around in engineer/prostudio circles.

[Hugh Robjohns]

... people wanted lots of tracks, non-linear editing, and a proper 'mixer' with plug in processing.

Lots of tracks, non-linear editing and 'proper mixer' facilities were fairly commonplace by 1996. Sonic Solutions, Augan, DAR Soundstation, Pro Tools, SADiE, AMS Audiofile, and many more were all available and popular in different areas by then. However, plug-in processing was cutting edge technology in 1995/6 and ProTools were really the leaders with that, with their bespoke plugin format, at the time. Steinberg's VST format was first introduced in 1996 but it took a few years to become widely supported by plugin providers and DAW hosts. Pro Tools had also developed their own scalable interfaces which made large-scale multitrack recording and playback practical, which was critcally important to music studios at the time. Hence PT becoming ubiquitous in music applications back then.

...but it can do something which nothing else can do...STILL...after all these years...you can multitrack a band on HDX with effectively zero-latency cues, but running through the mixer - you can therefore punch in on the tracks that you're monitoring.

Er... That's also been possible on the SADiE hardware and SADiE LRX platforms since the mid 90s... Definitely not unique to Pro Tools, I'm afraid! As you say, though, it relies on having dedicated hardware interfacing which few DAWs enjoy.

H

[Jack Ruston]

I take your point, Hugh, but I was really talking about systems that are directly comparable in terms of the music production market that took up Pro Tools. Sadie is quite a different product in terms of its intended use, and its feature-set reflects that.

J

[The Elf]

Er... That's also been possible on the SADiE hardware and SADiE LRX platforms since the mid 90s... Definitely not unique to Pro Tools, I'm afraid! As you say, though, it relies on having dedicated hardware interfacing which few DAWs enjoy.

Direct Monitoring?

Even Digidesign's humble MBox2 lets you mix between DAW output and incoming audio with zero latency.

I suppose I'm spoiled by RME's TotalMix, but I don't see monitoring through the computer to be particularly desirable. As long as you have some sort of mixer in front of the DAW then you have zero latency.

[scifiwriter4]

Post deleted by zenguitar

[Dave B]

Personally, I think this whole "industry standard" thing is just a way for audio elitists to feel better about themselves.

Depressingly, I think that it's more requested by those that aren't elitist - but just want to download "what the pros use" from a torrent site somewhere ... innit

[muzines]

It's worth remembering that the term "Industry Standard" is either used as a marketing term to help people choose to buy a particular product, or by people who do not have much knowledge/experience in the sector who are asking "what is the industry standard..?" as, well, a way to choose which particular product to invest in (to buy, to learn etc).

It doesn't really mean anything else...

[Mike Stranks]

This discussion takes me back to a saying from the IT world in the 70s when we were all still using mainframes or minis... "No-one ever got sacked for buying IBM..."

desmond's touched on this... often a driver for people is "Well, if they're all using/buying it it must be alright..."

[Hugh Robjohns]

I take your point, Hugh, but I was really talking about systems that are directly comparable in terms of the music production market that took up Pro Tools. Sadie is quite a different product in terms of its intended use, and its feature-set reflects that.

Nah! It's no good squirming Jack! You said "... Nothing else ... can multitrack a band ... with effectively zero-latency cues, but running through the mixer - you can therefore punch in on the tracks that you're monitoring....

But other things can, so lets not 'big up' Pro Tools unfairly. I frequently do as you describe with a SADiE LRX and have done for nearly two decades. If I was tracking a band on location I'd much rather do it with an LRX than a PT HDX rig! Smaller, easier, more reliable....

Yes, SADiE is a different product. It's audio editing tools are better, for a start! And yes, I accept that PT is a well-rounded product for the music studio application. SADiE's plugin handling could certainly be better, and it has no MIDI at all, let alone some of the clever music production tools that PT offers. So I wouldn't want to use it as a mix engine for commercial pop/rock, but for classical and acoustic stuff it is excellent, and for broadcast programme creation and CD mastering it's very hard to beat. Horses for courses...

Let's just keep a sense of proportion as to where PT sits in the grand scheme of things, though.

[Chevytraveller]

Well...it's not a question of people just 'saying' that it was the standard - it was pretty much the only game in town. In the 90's if you wanted a DAW that could record lots of tracks of audio and behave 'like a tape machine', which is what people wanted as a replacement for both tape, and hardware digital multitracks, what else was available?
J

This is certainly true when talking about the hardware, for a long time in the 90's people were buying TDM systems if they wanted high track counts and editing, but the Pro-Tools software at that time(V3.5-4) was truly awful..
Once the other main DAWs added DAE compatibility(in '94) there was a huge uptake of people running 3rd party DAWs (with Pro-Tools hardware) as there was no MIDI functionality until much later.

[The Red Bladder]

Why bloody Pro tools?

(snip)

If you are the industry standard, you should be judged and marked to a higher standard than others.

OK, let's get some facts going here -

1. PT became a sort of standard for a long time, for the simple reason that it was the only low-latency (i.e. had a processing card) DAW that was marketed World wide. Others, like Sadie and Soundscape were every bit as good, if not better, but failed to be marketed globally and in the US in particular. That put PT firmly in the lead in the A-for-V post production field in NY and LA and consequently, everywhere else that wanted to work with Hollywood.

2. PT is still the A-for-V post-prod standard, for the simple reason, we have to have a standard. If you are tracking a film score in London, someone else is tracking ADR in NY and the director and producers are in LA, they will be firing project folders at one another, or even working simultaneously via high-speed Internet connection. That means, everybody has to be using the same system and the only established A-for-V DAW is PT.

3. Outside of A-for-V, PT is NOT the standard. Many people like Hans Zimmer works in CuBase, many others work in Nuendo and at least half of the top ten pop tunes you see/hear on MTV/Viva/Four-Music etc., are done in Logic.

4. When it comes to numbers of users of all DAWs for all purposes, PT is at position four. The figures are CuBase 20%, Logic 18%, Reaper 13%, ProTools 12%, Studio One 8%, Ableton Live 7%. Those figures are just users and make no account of turnover, levels of professionalism or anything else!

5. PT belongs to Avid and Avid is fighting for survival. The share price continues to drift down as ever-poorer results are filed every quarter. The other arm of Avid is video and that is losing market share to Adobe's Premier package at a rapid rate. The main drivers for this is a lack of innovation and a series of bugs and blunders within their main editing package Media Composer.

6. Former CEOs Greenfield and Krall more or less ran Avid into the ground with pointless and unfocussed M&As, silly attempts to farm out R&D to low-wage countries like the Ukraine and the developing of a corporate structure (over 40 prestige offices around the World) more in line with a global player like Adobe or Sony, not a minnow like Avid! Taken in all, the M&As of companies like M-Audio, Soft Image, Pinnacle and at least 17 or 18 others (all of which had to be either killed off or sold for pennies) cost Avid over $1 billion! OK, most of that was share-swaps, which are akin to Monopoly money, but they still racked up massive losses on these cock-waving adventures.

7. New CEO Hernandez is bringing adult supervision to Avid, but he has a massive back-log of things that need urgent attention, such as bringing MC and PT up to the technical levels (in both features and stability) of the competition. The code of both have been worked on by all sorts of disparate teams, who have subsequently either been fired or wandered away, all by themselves. For example, Avid under Greenfield fired the entire Sibelius (notation SW) team, who then walked straight into the arms of Yamaha and a multi-million budget to develop an even better notation SW package for CuBase and Nuendo.

8. Hernandez tried to make up lost ground, by buying Orad, the Israeli virtual studio company, for $65m. The engineers at Orad fear that as soon as Avid has 'integrated' their technology into MC, they will lose their jobs, so they are making life as difficult for their new masters as possible. Also, the results for Orad after the acquisition have proven to be VERY disappointing and it is assumed that the former owners dressed up a turkey to make it look like an eagle (which does not say much for the due diligence team at Avid and may even be the result of desperation!)

9. In order to swallow Orad, cover cash short-falls and get R&D back up and running, Avid has just borrowed $205m. Many observers are beginning to speculate that this could be the beginning of dressing the company up for a M&A marriage or an assets sell-off. This constant speculation, combined with round after round of redundancies, is severely sapping internal morale.

10. Avid is trying to get users to opt for a subscription-based model, rather like Adobe CS, but, although quite a few have gone for this, many are resisting and finding that the latest version of PT is no better than older versions and has no notable new features. They have many users and a large professional user-base, but as more and more professional audio engineers are free-lancers who have to finance their own rigs, this user-base is just not turning into revenue to the extent hoped.

[Folderol]

Interesting.
Is there any industry that not being destroyed by the executive culture?

[Jack Ruston]

Nah! It's no good squirming Jack! You said "... Nothing else ... can multitrack a band ... with effectively zero-latency cues, but running through the mixer - you can therefore punch in on the tracks that you're monitoring....

But other things can, so lets not 'big up' Pro Tools unfairly. I frequently do as you describe with a SADiE LRX and have done for nearly two decades. If I was tracking a band on location I'd much rather do it with an LRX than a PT HDX rig! Smaller, easier, more reliable....

Yes, SADiE is a different product. It's audio editing tools are better, for a start! And yes, I accept that PT is a well-rounded product for the music studio application. SADiE's plugin handling could certainly be better, and it has no MIDI at all, let alone some of the clever music production tools that PT offers. So I wouldn't want to use it as a mix engine for commercial pop/rock, but for classical and acoustic stuff it is excellent, and for broadcast programme creation and CD mastering it's very hard to beat. Horses for courses...

Let's just keep a sense of proportion as to where PT sits in the grand scheme of things, though.

Ha I do accept that. I'm not belittling Sadie, I've seen it in action, and know that it has superior features in some ways. But for the reasons you outline it's not something I could choose to buy. It's just a different product. I couldn't do what I'm required to do with it in the same way as one of the music DAWs. And I have been careful to make it clear that I'm talking about the music production side specifically.