What kind of Pro Tools user are you? The last time we asked was in 2018. How have things changed over the last 3 years?

Pro Tools has gone through many transitions over the years, at one time the only people who could afford to use it were professionals in large studios then as time passed, Digidesign, then Avid, made Pro Tools available to even more people, but has the introduction of subscription plans changed that?

Especially over the last few years and most recently with the worldwide covid pandemic, the industry has changed almost beyond recognition and some who used to track in million-dollar commercial studios, or producing multi-million dollar films are now using laptops and working from a shed in the garden.

Whatever timespan you consider, the changes are significant! It can be summed up by a phrase I've coined, the 'cottage-isation' of our industry, both in the music and post sectors. What I mean by this, is more and more people are working from home or in very small facilities working largely ‘in the box’ without the need for large format consoles, big rooms, large multi-room studio complexes and so on.

Take sound post-production in a feature film for example. It is more than likely that, most if not all, the different stages of the post-production workflow will be done by different individuals working from home, just take a look at the series we did a while back on Audio Post Production Workflows and most of this work was done in home-based facilities. Working in the box also means we don’t need lots of expensive hardware to do what we can do. A computer with a reasonable monitoring environment and we can do almost everything. The term ‘bedroom boy’ is no longer valid as some kind of insult, this is the reality of the modern audio production industry.

Is it work/life balance or necessity?  Is it being driven by the fact that we no longer need large studios full of expensive equipment anymore for a lot of what we do in both music and post? Or is it perhaps budgets, costs and overheads are the driving factors here? 

So we thought we'd see what now makes up the Pro Tools user community today.

It's a simple poll and we know we can't cover every possible answer to suit every scenario so choose the ONE THAT BEST FITS YOU.

This should be interesting.