We decided to test out the new Pro Tools 12 subscription plan yesterday.

It wasn’t the smoothest of operations, the experience included the store losing the purchase, but after battling through several screens we got our hands on it… sort of.

Getting The Pro Tools 12 Licence To Work

Once purchased a subscription licence is placed in your iLok account. Not knowing what Avid were going to do with the old Pro Tools licence we used a different account and iLok, we weren’t taking any chances on licences going missing in the process.

So we started the iLok Licence Manager and as with other licences dragged the licence onto our iLok, all seemed happy. Then we launched Pro Tools 12 which started looking for a licence and said it could not be found. After 20 minutes of faffing around it transpired that in order to activate the licence you don’t drag it to the licence as you do with all other iLok licences, instead you must use the activation screen inside Pro Tools 12. It can’t seem to handle it if the license is already on the iLok. So we had to deposit the licence back off the iLok and then let Pro Tools 12 install it via the activation screen and the iLok account. If you had a better experience then let us know.

Installing Pro Tools 12 Software

The next thing to know is that if you own Pro Tools 11 then it gets wiped when you install Pro Tools 12, we’re using Yosemite so we can’t test if this is the case with Pro Tools 10. So if you want a previous version of Pro Tools then install Pro Tools 12 on a different disk or partition, at the very least do a back-up.

Your Account Is Set To Auto-Renew

Now onto the money, as would be expected with any subscription based deal auto-renew is turned on in you Avid account so if you don’t want this to be the case then go and turn it off, you can see it in the image below.

Pro Tools 12 Review

This is not really a Pro Tools 12 review, partly because there isn’t a lot to review, some I/O changes and AFL/PFL has been improved, and there’s a new start-up screen. Finally there’s a very sparse in-App market place with the grand total of 1 plug-in for sale when we tried it - it’s also painfully slow to use.

Collaboration and the other cloud based features that Avid have been showing are not included in this first release of Pro Tools 12.

In fact in any other universe this would have been called Pro Tools 11.5 at best. Apparently there are a lot of changes under the hood, we have seen reports that the same session using Pro Tools 12 uses less system resources that Pro Tools 11 so we decided to test that theory, you can see the Pro Tools 12 performance test here. We didn’t keep it on our machine long enough to find out much more about stabilty over any real length of time.

Pro Tools 12 - Our Advice

If you want to try out Pro Tools 12 then take our advice and wait for a demo to appear, if you can’t then sign up for a month before you make a full commitment. Back up your Pro tools 11 install or use a different partition before installing it.

There are other features coming soon…seeing is believing.