RANT: Fuck You Avid!!

[Loren Littlejohn]

I don't know about anyone else...

But when I'm preparing stems, I would rather do it in 1 min vs 12.

There should at least be an option. It's not like other daws make it impossible to bounce with external hardware.

It really is silly either way you look at it not to have both.

 

[Jarkko Mattheiszen]

Stems really shouldn't take longer than a single bounce. Route the stems to new stereo tracks, hit record and export the regions. Done.

 

[Ermz]

I always wanted to be a PT user. I prayed for the day PT would go native... and now that it has I just bought Cubase 6 anyway. It's always these little things that put Avid behind on the usability curve that make PT a non self-sustainable DAW for me. While they may be leaders in workflow and UI, they always seem to be trailing on the technology front, with a rapidly aging, inefficient plug-in platform, odd lack of features such as channel presets, offline bounce, bus soloing (yknow the convenient way every other DAW does it), slip editing etc. As much as I love the look and feel of the software when I use it, I just can't bring myself to do everything on there.

 

[pifos_2]

http://protools.ideascale.com/

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

Stems really shouldn't take longer than a single bounce. Route the stems to new stereo tracks, hit record and export the regions. Done.

Or check every track you want to bounce, tell it what folder you want it to go to and hit bounce. Wait 30seconds to a min and your all done.

This assumes your not using external hardware.

If you are, well then there is no "better" way.

There is also not setup this way. In pro tools I have to create new stereo track and rout it all up.

 

[crillemannen]

I always wanted to be a PT user. I prayed for the day PT would go native... and now that it has I just bought Cubase 6 anyway. It's always these little things that put Avid behind on the usability curve that make PT a non self-sustainable DAW for me. While they may be leaders in workflow and UI, they always seem to be trailing on the technology front, with a rapidly aging, inefficient plug-in platform, odd lack of features such as channel presets, offline bounce, bus soloing (yknow the convenient way every other DAW does it), slip editing etc. As much as I love the look and feel of the software when I use it, I just can't bring myself to do everything on there.

What do you mean with channel presets??

You could save a channel in a .ptf file then just use import session data if you want to import a whole channel, with or without the audio files on that specific track.

Offline bouncing would be great for quick bounces, but i like to listen to the online bounce when im done, sometimes you can hear mistakes in the mix while listening.

 

[Soundlurker]

Offline bouncing would be great for quick bounces, but i like to listen to the online bounce when im done, sometimes you can hear mistakes in the mix while listening.

Ehm.... if you're exporting an mp3 you can listen to it while it's being exported off-line as well, by simply adding the unfinished mp3 to winamp or whatever you use, so I wouldn't say that's really an argument in real-time export's favour. In fact, since most of the times you will listen to what you've exported anyway I often choose to wait for the whole export as a sort of forced break so my ears can rest a bit, because I know otherwise I'll keep at it until they are toast and I'm starting to hurt the mix.

 

[Loren Littlejohn]

What do you mean with channel presets??

You could save a channel in a .ptf file then just use import session data if you want to import a whole channel, with or without the audio files on that specific track.

Or, you can right click on your mixer and save all of your mixer settings and recall them just as fast.

Track presets work like plugin presets. You recal the preset using a drop down menu and it loads up all the inserts you normally like to work with on the track (like a snare preset that pulls up an eq, then comp, then clipper, etc...).

 

[James Murphy]

I bet the offline bounce will be a ground-breaking uniquely new super-awesome feature in PT 10.

I'm glad Avid is always so much ahead of any other companies.

I always wanted to be a PT user. I prayed for the day PT would go native... and now that it has I just bought Cubase 6 anyway. It's always these little things that put Avid behind on the usability curve that make PT a non self-sustainable DAW for me. While they may be leaders in workflow and UI, they always seem to be trailing on the technology front, with a rapidly aging, inefficient plug-in platform, odd lack of features such as channel presets, offline bounce, bus soloing (yknow the convenient way every other DAW does it), slip editing etc. As much as I love the look and feel of the software when I use it, I just can't bring myself to do everything on there.

for about the 100th time sine i ever started posting on here.. and for my first post in many months... PT does not have offline bounce because it was not initially, nor for many years, a consumer/prosumer/hobbyist/amatuer-enthusiast platform.... and since offline bounce sucks giant nasty donkey balls... impossible when using outboard gear, and squirrelly even when totally ITB... it was left out. Avid is not "behind technology"... they have simply been slow to bow to consumer demands when they know that the results won't be good or reliable. Other companies just don't give a shit.... this came from a senior digidesign tech i new back when i still lived in California.... they could have added it THEN.. they just didn't want to.... sorry kids, many plug-ins, by the very nature of the processes they emulate, just don't work as well in offline bounces, i.e.., Compressor plug ins.

don't worry though, just as with their recent "going native", they will eventually cave to prosumer demands.

 

[AdamWathan]

James I can promise you that a plugin will work exactly the same offline as online. I don't know if you know much about programming an audio plugin, but they do nothing more than calculations based on the value of the samples they are fed. Offline bounce is just doing those calculations at the fastest speed the processor can handle instead of in real time... Math is still the same whether you do it slow or fast, it's a computer, that's all it does is math.

I still am a fan of real time bounce though for the reasons many others have mentioned, I even do it in Reaper even though I don't have to. And James is definitely right when it comes to the outboard stuff, no real pro studio is ever going to be able to use offline bounce anyways and that's Avid's primary market.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

for about the 100th time sine i ever started posting on here.. and for my first post in many months... PT does not have offline bounce because it was not initially, nor for many years, a consumer/prosumer/hobbyist/amatuer-enthusiast platform.... and since offline bounce sucks giant nasty donkey balls... impossible when using outboard gear, and squirrelly even when totally ITB... it was left out. Avid is not "behind technology"... they have simply been slow to bow to consumer demands when they know that the results won't be good or reliable. Other companies just don't give a shit.... this came from a senior digidesign tech i new back when i still lived in California.... they could have added it THEN.. they just didn't want to.... sorry kids, many plug-ins, by the very nature of the processes they emulate, just don't work as well in offline bounces, i.e.., Compressor plug ins.

don't worry though, just as with their recent "going native", they will eventually cave to prosumer demands.

This.
plus, Ermz: all the other features you mentioned (track presets, bus soloing etc) are of course possible in PT, even implemented in a much more convinient way than Cubase does it.
To me it sounds like a typical case of "I am used to the workflow in software A, trying to do the very same, possibly by hitting the same key commands, in software B...and it doesn't work like it does in software A> software B must be worse"...that's a flawed thought of course!

Yes, you can do it in Software B! but you'll have to know how of course, and once you found out how to do it you might actually discover that the workarounds you created in Software A and are missing in Software B were just that...workarounds, that have been used so often and successfully that one might think it's a great feature...but eventually you might discover that this "feature" that you're missing in Software B isn't really a "feature" but was just a crutch you had to develop to use software A properly...that crutch might not even be needed in software B.


I've been exactly there, I used to be the biggest Cubendo fanboi, and I did work on PT LE frequently....and I HATED it, I was so much faster in Cubase and PT was missing all these great features I knew and used to use in Cubase, to me PT really seemed like a flawd design, When I made the leap to PT HD I abandoned Cubase completely, I was still missing those workarounds at first, but since I HAD to work in PT now, I had to learn how to do things in PT...and yes, it IS different from how you do things in Cubase, and THAT's why I missed the Cubase way of doing things....NOT because it was the better way...
When I finally found out how to do it in PT I also realized that my oh so great workflow and macros and key commands etc in Cubase were just a crutch to begin with...one that I didn't need anymore when I found out how to do it in PT...and that's when I stopped missing those workarounds.

point is: all those features you're asking for ARE implemented in PT (except for the offline bounce for obvious reasons), but many of those features you won't even need once you learn the software, cause the only reason you used them in Cubase was because it's the fastest and most convinient way to do things in cubase....you just have to let go of the idea that the fastest and most convinient way in PT has to be the same way things are done in cubase.
it's a different way, you'll have to learn where it is and how to walk it, but once you know that path as well as you knew the path in cubase you'll realize, that it's actually shorter and has less hurdles in the way

 

[Ermz]

I think it's unrealistic to consider offline bounce a hobbyist or amateur use only feature. It's highly requested simply because it's a useful alternative to real-time bounce for many people and many situations.

Its value when running off dozens of roughs comparing takes, tones, edits etc. for stuff that doesn't need to be detail-checked from top to bottom as it bounces, nor needs to run any outboard in real-time is immeasurable.

I run a whole rack full of outboard on my mixes, yet I find myself using the off-line bounce in Cubase just as much as real-time, simply because there are plenty of other things to bounce over the course of a project than just final mixes. My preference is to have those bounce times total up to minutes, rather than hours.

Plenty of nulling tests have supported that both types of bounces produce identical results for all plug-ins and DAWs that are coded sanely.

 

[James Murphy]

Adam.. as you might have guessed, my primary point is to do with outboard gear... but, despite being right about the theory, you are wrong about the empirical results... at least in some cases; while using DP for a few years, i noted several plug-ins that did not AT ALL work the same... i.e., deliver the same sonic results... with offline bounce.

 

[Ermz]

Lasse, you seem to think I've only recently come into using PT or something. I've been using both platforms in parallel for many years now. I'm quite familiar with the workflow and strengths of both, hence why I use them in tandem. Cubase is still my preferred mixing platform, much as PT is still my preferred tracking and editing platform. In fact I think I was championing the strengths of PT to you back when you were still a very avid (ba-doom) Cubase fanboy. Somewhat of an irony at this point.

Also, saying those things are implemented in PT might as well be the same thing as saying that Beat Detective is implemented in Cubase. Sure, it looks, nor works nothing like it... nor actually exists at all, but you can still edit drums! It's just a completely different workflow.

Of course PT can slip edit. But you have to do it using the keyboard, hence defeating the main workflow benefit.
Of course you can use track presets... but they are embedded in whole session templates, and aren't anywhere near as easy to implement on a track-by-track basis as they are on Cubase.
Of course you can solo busses... but only if you play a tapdancing game to get only the tracks you want, other than the ones that have been put on 'auto-solo' belonging to other busses, completely irrelevant to what you want to hear.

AND the reasons for offline bounce not being in there aren't obvious. The only thing that's obvious about it is that Avid are willfully holding it back (for no reason whatsoever other than to agitate their user base?), or their code is such shambles that they actually can't do it.

While you might believe it's a case of familiarity with one workflow over another (which is most definitely isn't), I believe this is just a case of blind fanboyism towards one platform taking the place of that of another, supported by completely circumstance-driven rationalization.

Edit: Word 'nudge' changed to 'slip edit'

 

[~BURNY~]

derp

 

[James Murphy]

Plenty of nulling tests have supported that both types of bounces produce identical results for all plug-ins and DAWs that are coded sanely.

i think that this is a totally unsupportable claim Ermin.... and while i get your point about needing/wanting quick bounces at various stages of a project, i don't think you serve it well with this particular statement.

 

[gabriel g.]

As shown in another thread I have some major problems with logic (and I am fanboy). I went to lasses studio and picked up his old desk and he showed me the protools ways of doing that stuff.
It was different but it all worked like it should.

So I decided to make the switch to protools. I know it will take some time to get used to the new shortcuts and workflows but as a pro Logic user I can tell you that protools does it shit RIGHT.

I used cubase vst, sx3 up to cubase 4. Then made the switch to logic. Used logic 8 and 9 and now I am making the switch to protools.
If you are fine with your software its good for you, but at some point you know what you need and for me it is protools.....

 

[Lasse Lammert]

dunno Ermin, I can solo those busses in PT just like I did it in Cubase (the feature you're looking for is called "solo safe")...I import track presets with one key command and one click (actually faster and easier than in Cubendo), and I nudge with the keyboard and the mouse...but yes, I can't nudge using my thoughts in PT yet, that interface hasn't been developed for PT .

and the "import track presets/session data" actually works in PT...I don't know how it is in Cbase6, but up to Cubase4 (last version I used( it never worked properly, always got error messages (like "track type doesn't fit" or something like that), or it just imported presets to the wrong tracks, missed plugs etc....
so I never used it, in PT it works flawlessly....but I admit, I haven't used Cubase6, perhaps they've fixed that.

 

[Jaymz]

Im loving PT here and ive only had it a day

 

[Soundlurker]

Say what you want about the different interfaces of Cubase and Protools and argue in favour of either but you just can't deny the usefulness of offline exporting with the argument that "it sucks balls" and claiming it's not pro enough. I assume it's pro to waste time and therefore money on a bunch of non-critical exports?