Also with Hybrid Engine, bigger sessions and customisable UI
Long time industry stalwarts Avid, update their widely used DAW Pro Tools with some quality of life upgrades. Some of these features have been expressed in the past and some are new additions but they serve to benefit all users of Pro Tools.
What you need to know:
- New Hybrid Engine maximises Pro Tools performance, using native and DSP processing more efficiently.
- Pro Tools is now supported on M1 Mac computers.
- In/Out has been upped to 64 channels and 256 audio tracks can be used simultaneously.
Read all the latest product news here.
For HDX system users, Hybrid Engine is now available, letting you move seamlessly between DSP and native audio processing with the click of a button. It allows additional voices up to an incredible 2048 which means bigger sessions become more available and easier to manage. This is probably going to get the most mileage from post-production editors where channel counts and the sheer amount of plugins is vast.
Apple changed the game by announcing they were going to produce their own CPUs, circumnavigating big players in AMD and Intel. The issue with this was that a lot of software has to be updated to run on this new chipset series. In the 2021.6 update, Avid have announced compatibility with Pro Tools software versions but notably excluded its hardware units HD Native and HDX. Hopefully compatibility for their HD and HDX hardware will come soon.
Pro Tools and Pro Tools | Ultimate can now utilise 64 channels of input/outputs and the Ultimate software has a new maximum voice limit of 2048. In addition to this 256 tracks of mono or stereo audio tracks can be used and at all sample rates.
User Interface in Pro Tools was due for an update and they have provided one here. Now you can customise almost every aspect of the interface, save settings as presets and switch between Dark and Classic UI themes without restarting the software. Nice.
For getting that sucking feeling in your tracks, side chaining has been updated to keep perfectly in line with your track. Automatic delay compensation is now available on side chains which is a much needed upgrade and means you can more easily achieve that Daft Punk pumping motion you’ve been after.
There’s a few other quality of life updates including Quicktime improvements, ability to change track width and copy plugins from different widths, playback engine optimisations on Intel Macs and more.
Check out the Hybrid Engine update explained below.
For more information on this update, head to Avid’s website.
