Avid Pro Tools Review | PCMag

From bedroom studios to the largest recording studios and post-production houses in the world, musicians, recording engineers, and producers use Pro Tools. It’s the best digital audio workstation (DAW) for larger studios with lots of outboard hardware and the need for extensive support networks, and its workflow remains second to none for veteran mix engineers. Accordingly, Pro Tools is our Editors’ Choice winner for professional recording studios and mix engineers, particularly for larger studios and those focused entirely on audio editing. If you’re more of a music composer or producer yourself, Cubase Pro and Apple Logic Pro are our top picks for PC and Mac users, respectively, thanks to their industry-leading virtual instrument bundles, advanced MIDI and scoring capabilities, and perpetual licenses.

There are four main versions of Pro Tools. Pro Tools Intro (free) starts you off with eight instrument and eight audio tracks, 39 instrument and effect plug-ins, including the venerable Xpand!2, and 2GB of loops. Thankfully, this one lets you bounce down projects and save your work, unlike the useless Pro Tools First. Unfortunately, the three paid versions are subscription-only; Avid finally killed off the perpetual licenses. Pro Tools Artist ($99 per year) is more akin to the old Pro Tools LE from years gone by and is fully usable for professional work. It includes Melodyne Essential for pitch correction, it supports 32 audio tracks, 32 instrument tracks, 32 Aux buses, and 16-channel simultaneous multitrack recording, and it includes more than 100 plug-ins.

(Credit: Avid)

Pro Tools Studio costs $299 per year and lets you play back up to 512 simultaneous stereo tracks at up to 192kHz, plus a single video track. It also adds Surround and Dolby Atmos immersive mixing, Clip FX Editing, and some key mixing features and extra plug-ins that I’ll get to below. Pro Tools Ultimate, which I tested here, costs $599 per year and can be used natively or with Avid’s high-end HDX digital I/O hardware (for still additional cost). Ultimate bumps the audio track count to 2,048, including up to 256 simultaneous record inputs. It adds support for multi-layered video edits (with up to 64 tracks) and broadcast standards, field recorder workflows, video editing, ExpertPlus support, and more that I don’t have the space for here.

Avid has always been tight with system requirements as the company certifies versions of Pro Tools for various new hardware releases—and the time necessary for that is far and away the longest in the industry, with most certifications for new OS revisions and hardware model releases taking months. Most recent PCs and Macs are compatible, but you’ll need at least Windows 10 or macOS 10.14.6 and 16GB of RAM on either platform; Avid recommends 32GB RAM. In 2023, Pro Tools finally brought native Apple silicon support to the app, resulting in faster performance all around.

For this review, I tested Avid Pro Tools 2024.3 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro) with macOS Sonoma (14.4.1), 16GB RAM, and an internal 1TB SSD, along with a pair of PreSonus Eris E8 XT studio monitors, a second-generation Focusrite 6i6 audio interface, and an M-Audio Oxygen 25 MIDI controller.

(Credit: Avid)

If you’ve never worked with Pro tools before, it’s easy to get your head around. The main interface has two main windows: Edit and Mix. The Edit window, which I’ll cover first, handles all recording, arranging, and detailed audio and MIDI editing. If you’ve used Pro Tools in the past, you already know audio editing is precise and seamless. From loop recording to sample-level editing to comping together tracks, you can quickly assemble and edit a performance with the combination Smart Tool cursor and apply crossfades—all within the main Edit window. New to Pro Tools are Track Markers, which let you add color-coded comments within tracks. You can also add multiple rulers to divide things up further.

Avid’s Audio Engine features a 64-bit architecture, a low-latency input buffer, and the ability to dynamically allocate host processing resources among dozens of plug-ins. The trick here is that each core doesn’t take on load until audio is passing through a given plug-in; just having it loaded and armed won’t do it. The System Usage window shows activity on each core during playback. Clip Gain, one of my favorite Pro Tools features, lets you adjust volumes on the fly using a pop-up volume slider without having to install Gain plug-ins or manually add automation data everywhere. Beat Detective picks up grooves in audio tracks, letting you fix timing issues across multiple instruments. Groove audio editing maintains relevant grid positions when copying, cutting, and pasting unquantized audio and MIDI clips.

You can search through tracks, instruments, and more using a type-ahead search capability, and you can also select multiple items in a menu simultaneously. The program captures performances retroactively if you weren’t recording—a small but amazingly useful feature that prevents you from having to remember to press Record when jamming and then wishing you had (or the reverse, where you clam up once the Record button is pressed and can’t capture the initial inspired idea as well).

(Credit: Avid)

The Pro Tools instrument bundle remains workmanlike. You get Xpand2, a multitimbral workstation plug-in; GrooveCell, virtual drum machine and sampler with an Akai-style pad interface; SynthCell is a two-oscillator, polyphonic synthesizer; Boom, a sequencing drum machine; DB-33, a tonewheel organ with a rotating speaker; Mini Grand, a modeled grand piano with several sounds and reverbs, plus variable dynamics via a single knob; Structure Free, which plays back sample-based instruments; and Vacuum, a monophonic “vacuum tube” synthesizer. Instrument track presets make it easy to save preferred virtual instrument plug-in chains.

One new instrument is the deceptively rudimentary PlayCell, a cute, line-drawn virtual instrument that offers quick sample playback. It comes with plenty of instruments and sounds, and more are available through Avid’s Sonic Drop program. Basically, it’s just an easier way to throw together a project without having to dive into Xpand 2’s tiny menus or open up massive sampled third-party instruments you own. Even with this addition, the instrument bundle could be much better; look to Cubase Pro, Logic Pro, Ableton Live, and even the budget-priced Mixcraft Pro to see how it’s done, with their large arrays of synthesizers and samplers and vast libraries of included patches.

Avid improved Pro Tools’ MIDI capabilities over the years. For 2024, Avid has added AAX MIDI effect plug-in support, with improved signal flow to route between tracks or plug-ins. Some are already bundled, such as a groove shaper and a Modalics EON arpeggiator. The pop-out MIDI Editor window still lets you handle most of the fine-detail work. The Score Editor is derived from Sibelius (which Avid acquired in 2006), and you can export Pro Tools sessions as Sibelius—or SIB—files. Now, though, you can copy and paste MIDI to and from Sibelius, so you no longer have to build two separate projects in two applications, a potentially huge timesaver. All relevant MIDI information transfers between them, including the conductor track.

(Credit: Avid)

If you’ve got an iPad, you can try Pro Tools Sketch, a non-linear, clip-based recording and performance tool. You can record audio or MIDI or use it to trigger loops and samples and then drag and drop to build an arrangement that then opens up in the Pro Tools Edit window. You can also keep MIDI clips as such or render them as audio when you bring them into the Edit window.

Coming back over from Apple Logic Pro, I still miss that program’s ability to set minimum and maximum velocity levels on a MIDI track; there’s no way to do that easily in Pro Tools. It’s also still unnecessarily difficult to do basic things. Setting up a MIDI controller requires diving into multiple, unobvious Preferences dialogs, and you can’t easily bring up a virtual instrument from the Edit window. You can certainly compose music with virtual instruments in Pro Tools, but other DAWs remain stronger for this purpose—something that won’t matter to the larger pro studios but that certainly affects bedroom producers on a budget.

Mixing and Post-Production in Pro Tools

The Mix window, the second of Pro Tools’ two main modes, remains a fabulous place to work, particularly if you have one of Avid’s awesome control surfaces, but even just with the mouse cursor. The Mix window displays all your tracks in a mixing board style—and one that’s closer to the real thing than Logic Pro and Studio One, particularly when it comes to the way Pro Tools handles aux busses, sends, and returns. Studio One can create those more quickly, but if you think the way a mix engineer thinks, you’ll probably still prefer Pro Tools. One key gripe has been remedied: The Mixer window finally (finally!) lets you change the order of inserted plug-ins by dragging and dropping them.

(Credit: Avid)

The new Dolby Atmos renderer is now integrated within Pro Tools and supports live re-renders from binaural through 9.1.6. It supports monitor mixes using Apple Spatial Audio and lets you export stems with delay compensation. You can also now export a session range, meaning a section of a session, such as when breaking up live recordings into songs. The mixer supports several metering standards, including peak and average to VU, K, and PPM, for matching up with regional broadcast requirements. You can grab and automate any parameter anywhere across any track. All plug-in automation is time-stamped, and you can write automation while a track is in input or recording.

As part of the base installation, AIR effects cover all the major bases when mixing. One of my favorites is Avid Channel Strip, an AAX plug-in that mimics Avid’s ultra-high-end System 5 console’s EQ, dynamics, filter, and gain effects. Although it’s not automatically built into every channel, you can always add it. It sounds excellent and is almost infinitely flexible. The included Bomb Factory’s BF76 compressor (a Urei 1176 emulation) is nearly spot-on.

Pro Tools Studio and Ultimate both add some key features and plug-ins that will take your mixes to the next level. These include VCA mixing; advanced metering; the excellent Pro Compressor, Pro Expander, Pro Limiter, and Pro Multiband Dynamics suite of plug-ins; HEAT analog stage modeling; X-Form time stretching, and the Pro Subharmonic low-end booster for cinema-style thunder and kick drums that will give the largest subwoofers a workout. The top two Pro Tools versions also include Space, which offers an array of beautiful-sounding convolution reverbs, complete with multiple photos of the actual room that was used for recording each impulse response file.

(Avid)

The built-in Avid Video Engine lets you edit multiple HD video formats, including RED and Avid DNxHD, from within Pro Tools without transcoding. It also works with Avid Mojo DX, Avid Nitris DX, and a variety of AJA and Blackmagic Design video interfaces for monitoring DNxHD and QuickTime video. Satellite Link synchronizes up to 12 Pro Tools installations, including HDX, HD/TDM, and native. Cloud-based collaboration features from Avid let up to 10 users work on a single project.

Pro Tools also works exceptionally well importing sessions created in other programs—more so than with any other major sequencer. For example, you can exchange project sessions with not only other Pro Tools users—native or HD, PC or Mac—but also with Logic Pro, Cubase, and Avid Media Composer users. You can also import I/O settings directly from existing projects into new ones. I’ve done a variety of projects where I’ve either exported from or imported to Pro Tools to mix; there’s plenty of flexibility here for collaboration—if you’re willing to put in the extra time to allow for those imports and exports with other DAWs.

Despite its various quirks, Pro Tools is as robust and full-featured as ever. Although we don’t think anyone shopping for a sequencer should base their decision entirely around this, Pro Tools remains the standard DAW in recording and post-production studios across the world. Buying into Pro Tools, in whatever capacity, will mean your projects have the largest potential compatibility base should you want to work with other musicians, forward a project to a producer, or hire a mixing engineer who wants to look at the actual track data and plug-ins you used, and not just a stack of tracks you exported as individual audio files.

Avid Pro Tools is a robust digital audio workstation and our Editors’ Choice winner for larger recording and post-production projects. Pro Tools scales incredibly well, all the way up to massive Pro Tools HD systems in the largest and most well-specified studios, complete with subscription-based support policies to match, all while maintaining project compatibility across the board. Apple Logic Pro is our Editors’ Choice for composers and producers on the Mac platform because it’s easier to compose music with, and the same goes for the nicely updated Cubase Pro on the PC side. But Pro Tools still holds court as the standard-bearer for cross-platform digital audio workstations when working on client projects day in and day out.