If you are not a Brit then you might not have seen the TV show Room 101. It’s a show based on Room 101 from the George Orwell novel 1984, a place where people are subjected to their worst nightmares to try and break them down.

The TV Show asks guest what they would like to put in Room 101, in other words things they would like to remove from life. It’s a fun show and often you find yourself agreeing with the guest as they suggest all sorts of things to put in Room 101.

Here are three Pro Tools shortcomings I would like to put into Room 101.

The Pro Tools Workspace

I’ve made no secret of how I feel about the convoluted workflow that Workspace inflicts on the Pro Tools user. Most of the time I simply use the Mac OS Preview application to audition sounds and samples for sessions, rather then chasing the Workspace around a session. Compared to all other DAWs Pro Tools’ handling of audio clips and loops in the Workspace is a car crash. It easily gets put into Room 101

Crippleware Versions Of Pro Tools

I’m not naive to think that all Pro Tools users should get the same features irrespective of how much they pay for the software. However Avid have a long history of crippling products in often counter-productive and nonsensical ways. One of the most recent examples is the Avid Apogee Bundle, which offers an interface that can give surround mixing but Avid have chosen to cripple it with Pro Tools. This means if you want to mix surround on an Apogee interface then you can do it with almost any DAW but Pro Tools. So Avid crippleware also gets put into Room 101

Forgotten Bugs In Pro Tools

It seems that there’s a serious bought of amnesia at Avid when it comes to bugs, or perhaps I should say silence. A new version of Pro Tools can appear and suddenly a features acts unexpectedly or stops working altogether. I’m sure we all have our own bugbears, for example one of mine is that MIDI Step Input stopped working in Pro Tools 11 and to date remains broken. What makes matters worse is the wall of silence you get from Avid, not a squeak that can often which can leave the user wondering if it’s just their system that is broken or if they are doing something wrong. So Avid’s handling of bugs also goes into Room 101.

What About You?

So there are three Pro Tools shortcomings that I’d send to Room 101 - what are yours?