Nil <redn...@REMOVETHIScomcast.net> wrote:
>
>OK, that's an advantage, though not a technical one but rather one of
>workflow and business practice.
That's where all the advantages are.
>Does Pro Tools have any technical advantages? Seems to me that most
>modern DAWs should be able to capture the signal from a digital audio
>converter equally well. I see some people make some weak claims that
>one may process the data in a slightly different way than another, and
>the result may sound different than the other, but it's all pretty
>vague. Is Pro Tools any better at the basic job of capturing or
>processing audio? Are its plugins better? Or conversely, is it any
>worse?
When Pro Tools first came out, it was pretty awful. It had serious issues
with fidelity... you could load a file in, load it back out, and the bits
weren't the same even when you did no processing or editing.
It's a lot better than that today. The user interface is still pretty
godawful, but it's a lot better than that.
>In other words, given the same external setup (mics, preamps, good-
>sounding room, etc.) will Pro Tools make a better recording?
Pro Tools doesn't make recordings. Engineers make recordings.
Engineers all work in different ways. Some want to mix in the box. Some
just use the DAW as a fancy tape machine and continue doing mixing the same
way they always did. Some want to mix the two.
Pro Tools has millions of features which make it possible to use for all
of these different methods. It's not really designed for any particular
job, it's designed to do everything. Like most swiss army knife tools, it
doesn't really do any of them all that well, but it does enough of them
serviceably.
>> How do de facto standards like this come about? It is a weird
>> kind of social process.
>
>It was one of the first on the market, wasn't it? And they targeted
>(and priced) themselves at the professional studio market, rather than
>the hobbyist. It appears that they got in on the ground floor when
>there wasn't really any competition, and now they're firmly entrenched.
True, but there were a lot of other products doing the same thing. Many
of them were much more specialized tools, too, and some of those specialized
tools found niche markets. A lot of them died. Pro Tools became the
standard for a lot of work.
A lot of systems that were much better than Pro Tools at the time disappeared.
For example, I'd really like to know what could have happened if the Orban
Audyssey had been developed for another 20 years instead of being abandoned.