At the Avid Connect event, prior to NAB 2017 in Las Vegas, Avid are announcing their intention to release a new version of their free application Pro Tools First, which unlike the full version of Pro Tools hasn't seen an upgrade since it was released around the time of Pro Tools 12.3.

Pro Tools First New Features

Pro Tools First is getting the following new features...

• Track Freeze
• SoundBase
• 500MB of the loop library added in Pro Tools 12.7
• Full Avid Cloud Collaboration support.

Anyone Can Work Together

With this new version of Pro Tools First, anyone will be able to use Cloud Collaboration whether they have Pro Tools First, Pro Tools Native or Pro Tools HD, so this takes Pro Tools First out of its island and frees up any Pro Tools users to be able to collaborate with anyone else, whether it is Pro Tools First to Pro Tools First user through to Pro Tools First to Pro Tools HD users, with Avid Cloud Collaboration any Pro Tools users can work together..

What this also means is that if you need to work with someone and they don’t have Pro Tools then they can download Pro Tools First and then they can work with you. You can even send an invite to someone via email because they don’t show up in the Artist Chat and in that email will be a link to the Pro Tools First download page, so they can set themselves with Pro Tools First ready to work with you across Avid Cloud Collaboration.

Will Avid Unlock The 3 Session Limit?

We are hoping that Avid will also provide an option to unlock the 3 project limit for Pro Tools First and would it be too much to ask for the ability to have local storage too with Pro Tools First? I hope not as that together with a more reliable version of Pro Tools First would enable anyone to work with a Pro Tools user irrespective of what version of Pro Tools you use.

Dates And Times

Avid are not specifying version numbers or when these new features will be released at this time, but because of corporate regulations, these features will have to be released within the quarter so we can expect releases with these features in them by the end of June 2017.