Using Sync Points Tutorial

Sync Points in Pro Tools are useful when you want to line up a point within a Region (other than the region start and end) with a specific location in your session, like a bar|beat location or an exact frame. Read more

Pro Tools LE 7.4cs4 Update Released!

Back in December ‘07 I started running 7.4 LE. Not only was I excited to start using Elastic Audio. But I was also hoping that 7.4 would rescue me from the missing waveform displays, Nudge values that couldn’t be set and from the Groove Quantize induced crashes that characterized my 7.3 LE experience. Yes. 7.3 was dismal - apparently not for everyone (as usual) - but for me it was “very problematic”. So, I was hoping 7.4 would be better.

While the early releases of 7.4 LE did correct some of the above issues, it introduced some new issues of it’s own. Issues that were even more hazardous to my work flow than the 7.3 issues. Specifically, MIDI would not play back in time on my 7.4 LE system.

I discovered this problem back in December when I loaded a song that I had spent probably 80-100 hours programming MIDI tracks for. I spent about two days (seriously) trying to figure out why, for some unknown reason, the song timing felt “off” even though everything lined up the way I expected it to - at least visually and in the MIDI Event list.

After troubleshooting for those two days I assumed it was a bug. I posted a new topic at the DUC to see if anyone else was encountering the same problems I was. Sure enough, pretty soon a bunch of users reported the same thing.

In February, Digidesign acknowledged the issue and said a service release was on the way. So, all of the users who were experiencing the problems were forced to find a workaround until a fix came. My work around? Go back to Pro Tools 7.1, the last consistently stable release I’d used.

Now - it looks like the fix is here.

Based on my experience, I’m not going to get too excited until I have a chance to test it out. And I’m not going to test it out until I have a clear window of downtime (just in case I need to go back to 7.1 again).

I’ll be sure to post when I’ve tested it out.

Until then, you can read the latest DUC posts from other users who’ve experienced the 7.4LE MIDI Timing Issues here.

Here’s where you can download the update.

If you’re running 7.4LEcs4 on your system, please share about your experience with it - good or bad - in the comments.

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Digidesign Customer Support Videos

Digidesign just released a few very helpful support videos at their website. There’s 10 videos that will be helpful to you if you are a new user in need of some quick help on the following topics:

• Product Registration
• Technical Support
• Pro Tools System Compatibility
• MBox 2 Family
• Authorizing the Ignition Pack 2 programs

I’ve scanned through the videos and would recommend them to anyone who is new to Digidesign and to the software (plug-in) authorization process. The series on authorizing the Ignition Pack 2 programs is particularly useful. Allot of users get tripped up in the registration and authorization process and opt-out due to the frustration. The four videos in this series will help you make sense of the terminology and walks you, step-by-step, through the process of registering and authorizing all the Ignition Pack 2 plug-ins.

Here’s the Link to the Videos.

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iLok Schedules Downtime

iLok.com Support have announced (via the DUC) that www.ilok.com will be offline for scheduled maintenance the first Tuesday of each month. The next scheduled maintenance is Tuesday, May 6, 2008 from 6pm to 10pm PST (or 2am-6am GMT).

Keep it in mind because during the maintenance, www.ilok.com won’t be available for license transfers, licenses purchased on the DigiStore, or for activation of iLok licenses.

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Pro Tools and OSX Leopard Support

Where’s Pro Tools LE for OSX 10.5? I don’t know and neither does anyone else. I know I, for one, would like to start taking advantage of some of the features that Leopard has to offer. Plus, I’m really excited about some non-music Mac software that only runs on 10.5.

Do we have any idea when Pro Tools LE will work on Leopard?

Yes, we do. A few weeks ago Digidesign General Manager, Dave Lebolt, took some time to post an update on the DUC. If you missed it, here’s some highlights.

The first thing I want to say to all of you is: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that getting here is taking so long and that we have not been able to communicate more about it, and also because we really do care about your experience as customers… Rest assured, we will not charge Pro Tools 7.4 owners for an update to support OS X Leopard. We’d love to have the new Leopard compatible version out to all of you, and it’s very painful not to have it for everyone right now.

Clearly, Digidesign knows how significant it is that they are not able to provide a Leopard compatible version of Pro Tools. So the question still is….when?

We hope to have the new release within between 1 and 2 months from now; some of that timetable is contingent on Apple. We’ll keep you posted as we get closer. Normally, we don’t want to give specific dates because that can cause problems in expectation and it’s better not to have negative surprises, but I’d like to share this info with you in the spirit of keeping closer to you as our customers.

So, if Dave’s estimate is correct we might see Pro Tools LE running on Leopard by about mid-June.

That would be nice.

You can read the full post from Dave Lebolt here.

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Remix Peter Gabriel at Home

Peter Gabriel has made the multi-tracks for Shock the Monkey available for free download at his Real World Remixed website. Read more