Avid Delisted from NASDAQ

[heshian46]

So, I guess the question is, who will buy the Pro Tools name?

Is there a Steinberg Pro Tools X, or Apple Pro Tools X in our future?

Im not saying Avid cant recover from this, but we all see the downward trend here.

 

[C_F_H_13]

Same here, and I'm confident that Pro Tools isn't doomed. It's the industry standard software, no matter what some of you guys are saying.

While I agree, it should be noted that just cause you're an "industry standard" doesn't make you invincible to financial ruin. You can ask gamers/programmers about all the amazingly huge companies that have crumbled and left their users in the dust.

So, I guess the question is, who will buy the Pro Tools name?

Is there a Steinberg Pro Tools X, or Apple Pro Tools X in our future?

Im not saying Avid cant recover from this, but we all see the downward trend here.

Apple will never buy Pro Tools. They lose enough money as it is in pro audio with logic. Logic's audio team has been scaled down to a few dozen people, no way they are ever going to expand that department for a new acquisition.

My guess is 1 of 2 horrible situations happens.

1-Avid is a heartless monster and drives digi into the ground instead of admitting defeat and Pro Tools ceases to exist. (unlikely)

2-Yamaha buys Pro tools. This scenario goes 1 of 2 ways. Either they keep Pro Tools the way it is and essentially compete with themselves (they own steinberg) OR they try to meld cubase and Tools into one program...or start trading patented technologies between them. Either way, cubendo and protools suffer from a company leadership that can't decide which is the flagship program. Look at cubase and nuendo right now: Nuendo is the "pro" app, yet cubase gets all the new features earlier.

Or maybe I'm totally wrong and protools just keeps trucking along under the avid name and this is all just been blown out of proportion.

 

[jipchen]

Same here, and I'm confident that Pro Tools isn't doomed. It's the industry standard software, no matter what some of you guys are saying. There might be one or two pros running alternative software here and there, but the bulk of studio professionals(every single engineer/producer who has worked in our studio the last two years) use Pro Tools.

Yeah but being the "industry standard" or a dominant company in your field in general doesn't mean anything if your company goes down the shitter. There have been dozens and dozens of examples for this, companies that once dominated their field are not even known by name anymore (not talking about audio software, just IT companies or the market in general). Also, just being very popular or widely used or accepted doesn't mean something is actually good (or better than the alternatives).


Personally I despise AVID, and their policy for the last years was an almost unbearable impertinence. The ProTools 9 and 9.1 (err, I mean 10 ) thing was probably the shittiest move I have ever witnessed. Talking about ripping of people, not fixing bugs and charging them for basic functions to work again, atrocious customer service, ridiculous pricing, etc etc.
Anyway, I still don't hope ProTools goes down the shitter along with AVID - if they do - because the software is actually decent (although other DAWs do a shitton of things better, and a lot of things worse of course).

I was also asking myself if Apple would buy the ProTools brand because the sure have the funds... but I don't think so, considering what Apple did with Logic X and the eMagic / Logic team. There's probably no money for them in audio.
And like Chris pointed out, it would be weird for Yamaha to buy ProTools. Who else is there that could afford it anyway?

 

[bryan_kilco]

Their ideoligy is outdated. Their software and hardware aren't up to the standards of the competitors anymore.

Maybe I should keep my mouth shut here, as I've never used PT, but our old bassist had PT9 and maybe his system was set up wrong or something, but PT9 ran like shit, took literally a few minutes to open a BLANK session, and would crash quite often. I recall him saying something about how they finally added track grouping too. My guess is that it was always there and he just didn't know about it, but if I'm wrong, then that's just crazy.

I've never laid my hands on PT, honestly, and I am quite happy with Reaper.

 

[egan.]

Maybe I should keep my mouth shut here, as I've never used PT, but our old bassist had PT9 and maybe his system was set up wrong or something, but PT9 ran like shit, took literally a few minutes to open a BLANK session, and would crash quite often. I recall him saying something about how they finally added track grouping too. My guess is that it was always there and he just didn't know about it, but if I'm wrong, then that's just crazy.

I've never laid my hands on PT, honestly, and I am quite happy with Reaper.

I feel like I keep defending something I'm not 100% behind but PT has had groups since I first touched it in 1997....presumably before. As far as the stability goes, there is a thread right now about how cubase 7 crashes constantly. I would never assume that means that all installs of cubase are shit. I know alot of folks here don't like the software or the business model which is fine but everyone needs to ask themselves whether they truly believe commercial facilities would seriously stick with software that plain didn't work. I mean seriously, if you have to have a piece of software running at least ten hours a day 6 days a week are we really going to stick with something that crashes and freezes constantly? Would clients?
Look at the guys here who use PT: Andy, Lasse, Brett, CFH13, crillemannen. None of those guys seem particularly bound by label worship.

 

[Line666]

there is a thread right now about how cubase 7 crashes constantly. I would never assume that means that all installs of cubase are shit.

No but if you did there would probably be an awful lot of truth in that too. I'm not prejudiced because I hate all DAWs equally.

Also, every single one of those guys use a Mac Pro, I was purely bagging on the stability of Pro Tools Windows architecture. If you can find me a pro studio that doesn't use OS X I will admit to being a plain ol' Pro Tools hater.

 

[C_F_H_13]

Look at the guys here who use PT: Andy, Lasse, Brett, CFH13, crillemannen. None of those guys seem particularly bound by label worship.

Yeah, I have no label worship at all. I've been using PT since version 4.5 or something (I had been using it about 6 months when PT5 came out). I switched to nuendo about 3 years ago for mixing. I now use both in tandem.

When I read about people saying that protools sucks I have to assume it's a poorly setup system. I've tried reaper 2 different times on my current system, and both times it was super sluggish and crashed 25% of the time I was using it...so I stopped.

Do I think reaper is buggy? Fuck no, just something in my system didn't jive with it.

 

[FarBeyondMetal]

Do I think reaper is buggy? Fuck no, just something in my system didn't jive with it.

Not to steal the thread but good on you. I'll be the first to admit REAPER has it's quirks and oddities but it has always been rock solid for me. Only times it ever crashed was on my old system that didn't have the power to do the type of processing I wanted to do, or because of a buggy plugin. Never has it crashed for me while using stable plug-ins at a reasonable cpu load.

That being said my experiences with pro tools on my system were nightmarish to the point that I never got past having an mbox mini to run pt8 just to open and consolidate projects sent to me. Even that is long gone because it was more trouble than it was worth.

So yeah I definitely agree with the guys that say PT is tricky on Windows, it may be able to be done but I sure as hell didn't get there.

 

[LeSedna]

As FBM says, in my own experience, every single time reaper has crashed on me, it was due to something obvious (like loading the CPU to 100% by having a gazillon softwares open at the same time) or a buggy VST somewhere, usually a freebie. Whenever I would remove the faulty VST, reape goes back to breeze mode.