So... Jon over at Audio Geek Zine has written about delay compensation in protools a few times this month, and if you're unfamiliar with the topic, you'll find them very helpful. But what I want to know is, why doesn't protools have this functionality built in?
Accoding to Sound Thinking, Digidesign's Protools family is by far the most popular recording software:
With Digidesign's 85% market share and more than 130,000 users world wide, it's not hard to see the huge advantage Pro Tools gives you over any other digital audio work station.Well, I find it very troubling that the most popular DAW, and possibly (see: probably) the most popular all-around-music-production software, doesn't have such a basic feature built in.
Just about all their competitors have it now:
| DAW | Delay Compensation Built-in? |
| Steinberg Cubase | Yes |
| Steinberg Nuendo | Yes |
| Ableton Live | Yes |
| FL Studio | Yes |
| Motu Digital Performer | No |
| Digidesign Protools | Edit: LE - No/HD - Yes |
| Adobe Audition | Yes |
| Apple Logic | (comes with some but it's not automatic) |
| Cakewalk Sonar | Yes |
How did this happen? Maybe digidesign has gone unchallenged in the pro-audio market too long?
Edit: One of the commenters has brought the fact that Pro-tools HD has Delay compensation to my attention.
As far as I'm concerned that's about as good as not having it, but that's subject matter for another post.
9 comments:
Love the site,
we should deff exchange links. I adding you to my blogroll.
Stay in touch,
Jamille Luney Music Analyst
Pro Tools does "include" delay compensation in its HD version. for them its all about the upsell, they want you to start with LE and then need all the features they left out of it so you will buy HD. Bastards....
It is all about getting those LE users to fork over 5 to 10 grand for HD. Though if you do a search over at the Gearslutz forum you will find a 20 dollar plugin that fixes the lack of delay compensation for le users. I forget the name right now but I can't pull it up while I'm on my blackberry typing this. There's a couple videos showing the software and it seems cool.
LE without ADC is unacceptable, absolutely!
I think even Cubase Essential has it! (For sure LIVE 7 LE has it)
They (DIGI) give you the plug-ins, but using them is impossible or very hard. You need a calculator here! Are you talking about workflow? Work-what?
I hope LE 8 is going to fix the things up a bit.
I agree it's a bit annoying to not have ADC in LE, I just want to note that ADC was added to HD as a necessity to the HD system because of how much delay is needed to use the HD cards. It was not about making you up-sell to an HD rig, it was a needed addition for the system. AND no one else had it at the time. So they were not simply leaving this off of the system.
So, maybe now they should add it. With all the new PT8 stuff has, there's not much you need than a good LE rig in most semi-pro production studios.
If you wanna be fair, LE has 32 bit internal, floating point processing, HD does not. If you wanna talk sonic quality, I would be thankful that LE has this. I'd go audio quality over ADC any day.
Great blog.
Keith
a Pro Tools user... HD in fact ;-)
Hello, Nice blog. Couple things. The plug in for Pro Tools LE compensation is called ATA & is from MellowMuse.com It was originally VST only but they have released a RTAS version now.
Second, Digital Performer didn't have delay compensation on OS9, however, from, I believe, version 4 on DP has had it. The only exception was for some folks using UAD cards. I think that the UAD2 & DP6 no longer have any delay issue. Someone correct me if I'm wrong! Best :) Walt
ProTools is my fav DAW, having spent time using PTHD. For my home setup my clients cant afford me having HD and ADC has been preventing me from getting LE hardware and using LE software. This is because when clients are paying by the hour and I dont have too much time, I'd prefer to spend the time on more enjoyable things than manual delay compensation.
I'm on PT LE and just gout a UAD card where the delay is big, I can deal with the mellowmuse plug-in, works ok, but the waveforms not lining up with the audio is so frustrating (for any kind of edit and automation), the second of delay drives me crazy, also starting and stopping is delayed alot, annoying.
I'm surprised more people doesn't mention this.
so a question:
Are these issues (waveform and sound not lining up, aux latency etc.) also present in DAWs that have Automatic Delay comp. (like PT HD, Logic and most others )
http://akmedia.digidesign.com/support/docs/Delay_Comp_PT_Host_Systems_33000.pdf
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