Apple AMS (Audio MIDI Setup) for Pro Tools

Before you can start using your external MIDI devices within Digidesign Pro Tools software, you need to let Pro Tools know about the MIDI hardware you’ve got connected to your system. For OSX users, this is done by creating a Studio Setup in the AMS - Audio MIDI Setup - application that comes as part of OSX. This tutorial will walk you through the process. Read more

Digidesign Pro Tools Window Configurations Tutorials

The Window Configurations feature in Digidesign Pro Tools enables you to quickly and easily save and then recall the layout of various windows in your Pro Tools session. In this series of articles and tutorials, you’ll learn everything you need to know to use Window Configurations to make your Pro Tools life better. Read more

From MIDI to Audio: Music Creation Workflow in Pro Tools Tutorial

This beginner-level tutorial takes you through step-by-step, from New Session, to creating MIDI, and routing and recording audio, and shows you how different Pro Tools features compliment each other in an everyday, professional, Pro Tools music creation workflow using MIDI and audio .
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Apple Mighty Mouse to Right-Click in Pro Tools

There’s a ton of cool features in Digidesign Pro Tools that take advantage of right-clicking your mouse. But by default, OSX doesn’t set-up the Apple Mighty Mouse for right-clicking. So, today I’m doing a tutorial specifically for Mac Pro Tools Users who are using the Apple Mighty Mouse, but who haven’t enabled it’s right-click capability yet. Read more

Digidesign Releases Pro Tools for Leopard

Great News! Digidesign have announced the availability of Pro Tools® 7.4.2 software, which provides Mac OS X 10.5.3* (Leopard) compatibility to Pro Tools|HD®, Pro Tools LE®, and Pro Tools M-Powered™ users. We’d like to thank our entire community of Mac users for their patience as we worked to bring a fully tested and reliable version of Pro Tools to Apple’s latest platform. Read the full story here.

Free Plug-Ins: Izotope Vinyl

Do you remember vinyl? I sure do. I used to love heading out on the bus to the record store where I’d spend hours flipping through racks and racks of albums, enjoying the unique aroma of just-pressed iron-ons, listening to tunes and checking it all out. I’ll always remember those first few seconds before the first note on a newly purchased piece of vinyl. Vinyl had a sound. Read more

Free Plug-Ins: TriTone Digital

Quite often, cool tools are borne, or discovered, out of necessity. Such is the case with how I came across TriTone Digital and as I then discovered, was the case with how TriTone Digital came into being. Both were the result of trying to meet a musical need. Read more

Pro Tools Window Configurations Tutorial 2

The second tutorial in a series on using Digidesign Pro Tools Window Configurations. This time, you’re going to learn how to use the Mix Window Display Settings property. Read more

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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