You may be wondering what changes have happened in Pro Tools in the last decade, there’s been quite a lot. However it’s worth noting that 2011 was a big year for changes in the world of Pro Tools, read on to find out more.

Pro Tools 10

With the release of Pro Tools 10 Avid added over 50 new features to Pro Tools...

• Clip based gain workflow

• Real-time Fades

• Extended Disk Cache

• Improved Disk Scheduler

• Support for NAS

• 24-Hour Timeline

• Visual Indication Improvements

• Export Selected Tracks

• Interplay Send To Playback

• Improved ISIS Support

• EUCON Integration Phase II

• Channel Strip Plug-in

• Down Mixer Plug-in

• In App Browser for Plug-in App Store, Help etc.

• Support for Mixed File Formats (FIle type, Bit-depth)

• 32-Bit Float Session Format

• Bounce To iTunes

• Send To Soundcloud

• Bus Interrogation

• Low Latency Monitoring for ASIO/Core Audio

• Audiosuite Now Preserves Metadata

• Audiosuite Now Has Multiple Windows

• Audiosuite Handles

• D-Fi Update

• Right Click to Reveal In Finder

• Media Composer Clip Gain Interop

• FGS UI Localisation

• 256 Voices (Pro Tools HD and Pro Tools with CPTK)

• 768 Tracks

• 512 Aux Tracks

• Improved ADC with up to 16,000 samples (Pro Tools HD and HD Software only)

• Extended Disc Cache

• Field Recorder Improvements

• Input Monitoring (with CPTK)

• Destructive Punch (with CPTK)

• Support for up to 2 Satellites

• Support For D-Command Multi-mode

• Media Composer Surround Track Interop

• CPTK Users now get Track Input Monitoring and Destructive Punch Record

With Pro Tools 10, you could mix multiple audio file formats and bit depths within the same session, including interleaved, without any file duplication for the first time. Plus, with support for 32-bit floating-point file formats, they offered higher resolution sound when recording or importing, with more headroom to preserve the audio integrity from beginning to end.

Pro Tools 10 brought better recording and playback performance when working on a laptop with an external drive or a network-attached storage device. Pro Tools HD now allowed users to load audio files used in Pro Tools sessions into RAM for cached playback. Pro Tools prioritised files closest to the current playhead location. This way, when you started playback, those files were already cached for playback. This was especially useful when working with shared media storage such as with Avid Unity MediaNetwork and ISIS shared storage systems.

With Automatic Delay Compensation now available 4 times more delay (16,383 samples) and twice the busses so systems could handle bigger mixes with more plug-ins.

With Pro Tools 10, all fades were now calculated and played back in real time, which eliminated the need for rendered fade files. This provided improvements in both disk performance, and file management and file exchange. Another benefit was that Pro Tools sessions opened more quickly than in previous versions of Pro Tools.

Pro Tools 10 provided clip-based gain for quick and easy gain matching of clips (formerly called regions in Pro Tools) from different sources in a Pro Tools session. The clip-based gain was applied pre-mixer, pre-fader and before any plug-in processing. This was especially useful when working with field recordings and sample libraries in post-production sessions. By adjusting the clip gain for individual clips on a single track, you could match their relative gain levels so that you do not have to execute complex track volume automation to compensate.

Pro Tools 10 now let users export any selected tracks in a session as a new session. This feature was especially useful in collaborative situations. For example, you might have been working on a large post-production session and you wanted your collaborator to only work on some dialog in the session while you continued working on other parts of the session. You could select the dialog tracks and export them as a new session. Your collaborator could then open the new session and edit the dialog. When your collaborator was done, you could import the session data from the dialog session to update the dialog tracks in your big session.

Continuing on the collaboration theme, Pro Tools added a feature that let users bounce mixes to an iTunes library with the Add to iTunes Library option in the Bounce to Disk dialog. When this option was selected, the bounced file was copied to the user's local iTunes library. Pro Tools 10 also let users share mixes with SoundCloud using the Share with SoundCloud option in the Bounce to Disk and the Export Selected dialog. When this option is selected, the bounced file was automatically uploaded to a user's SoundCloud account. 

Pro Tools 10 brought a new clip group file format (.cgrp). Region group files (.rgp) created with earlier versions of Pro Tools could be imported into Pro Tools 10 sessions, but clip group files (.cgrp) couldn't be imported back into earlier versions of Pro Tools. This new format also maintained clip gain settings with clip groups.

AAX Plugins - RIP TDM & RTAS

With Pro Tools 10 Avid delivered a new plug-in format - AAX that would replace both TDM and RTAS plug-ins with AAX DSP and AAX Native. Avid also released several new plug-ins with Pro Tools 10 which included Channel Strip, Mod Delay III and Down Mixer.

The new Avid Channel Strip plug-in brought the channel strip of the Euphonix System 5, with exact duplication of the console’s EQ and compression algorithms. The new Avid Down Mixer plug-in could be used to automatically mix greater-than-stereo multichannel tracks (such as 5.1) down to stereo or stereo tracks down to mono. The new Avid Mod Delay III plug-in offered multichannel and multi-mono modulating delay effects. Pro Tools 10 provided improvements for working with AudioSuite plug-ins and AudioSuite rendered audio clips, which included the ability to open multiple AudioSuite Plug-In windows, Fades and Clip metadata were preserved after an AudioSuite render,  Handles were added to AudioSuite processing for trimming out AudioSuite rendered clips and a Reverse option for Delay and Reverb AudioSuite plug-ins was added.

Existing plug-ins continued to work in Pro Tools 10 so you could have RTAS, AAX Native and AAX DSP plug-ins on a system with an HDX card. TDM systems could use Pro Tools 10 with AAX Native, RTAS and TDM plug-ins but not AXX DSP plug-ins. The AAX plug-in platform offered improved floating point plug-in platform and was ready for 64 bit operating systems

However other than Avid plug-ins there were precious few AAX plug-ins available in the early days of Pro Tools 10 and for early adopters of the HDX platform, like myself, there were even fewer AAX DSP plug-ins which is what brought about our searchable AAX Plug-in database so we could keep track of all the AAX Native and DSP plug-ins.

Pro Tools HDX

Avid announced a new interface card to be the successor to "Accel" cards. Avid offered complete system bundles with Pro Tools HDX & HD Omni, Pro Tools HDX & HD I/O and Pro Tools HDX and HD MADI with bundle prices that started at $9,999.

The new cards in the Pro Tools HDX system were all about power and compatibility and took the maximum number of interfaces up to 12 to allow 196 tracks, were 64-bit ready, and used the new AAX plug-in technology which was also 64bit compatible.

In terms of power, the new cards provided five times more DSP acceleration; four times more voices; four times more delay compensation; 1,000dB of additional plug-in processing headroom; doubled the number of audio channels and reduced latency to 0.7m/s regardless of buffer settings.

The retention of compatibility between Pro Tools 10 HD software and the existing audio interfaces at the time was considered to be a sign of the respect Avid had for their Pro Tools customers. Avid chose not to save themselves a lot of expensive of development costs that were required to create a bi-compatible system, Avid chose to support both, although they warned that with the release of Pro Tools 11 users would no longer be able to use the old cards or interfaces giving time to make the transition.