Digidesign pro tools 8 hd upgrade

But it's not just the colour scheme that's changed; Digidesign have given Pro Tools a fresh, modern, and slightly flatter appearance, with redesigned icons and an updated visual vocabulary.

The Edit window, in particular, has spruced up nicely, and although its basic layout remains largely the same, there's obviously been a great deal of polishing to make things clearer and easier for users. For example, the toolbar immediately stands out as looking different, but also offers many functional improvements see 'Tools In The Bar' box while keeping the same basic operation, and this ethos applies to most parts of the redesign.

An Edit window menu, accessible from a button at the top right of the toolbar, allows you to configure the various elements that can be made visible: as before, you can hide and show the Track and Region Lists, but the Universe view has also been incorporated as an optional part of the Edit window. I think this is a great idea, and I doubt anyone will miss having the Universe, if you'll excuse the expression, in a separate window. The Rulers area has also been improved, and the entire length of whichever ruler is the Primary Counter is now highlighted, making it much more readable on a larger display.

However, not every visual change to the rulers is so useful. Many of the ruler colours have unhelpfully changed from Pro Tools 7, with the Meter ruler becoming blue instead of green, and the Marker ruler grey instead of blue, for example. They have also become quite dark, and as such, less readable when working with the expanded views.

The Track List, on the other hand, is better in every respect. Staying with the theme of clarity, the separation between tracks in the list has become much more distinct, thanks to the fact that the track's colour strip has round corners and the contrast between the Track List's background and the track's foreground is more pronounced.

Perhaps the feature that will have Pro Tools users dancing in the street, however, is that rather than only being able to see and edit a single type of data on a track at a time, tracks in the Edit window now offer automation lanes, making it possible to work with multiple automation parameters — and even playlists — simultaneously.

Clicking this reveals or conceals automation lanes beneath that particular track. These work in exactly the same way as editing automation events on the track lane itself — which you can still do, of course — and each automation lane you add offers a button for adding another.

One particularly curious undocumented feature that arrived in Pro Tools 7. This was achieved by holding down some awkward key combination, while dragging the mouse to adjust the saturation level of the colouring in the Colour Palette window.

Engineer friends loved the pragmatic way it made the screen clearer particularly if you used the default behaviour of using colour to indicate different track types , but I always found the solution aesthetically clumsy.

Thankfully, in Pro Tools 8 this hidden ability has become more accessible, and the Colour Palette window now offers a Saturation slider as well as a more general brightness slider, which is useful if you prefer the lighter look of Pro Tools 7 to adjust the amount of a track's colour that should be applied to its background in the Edit and Mix windows. Not only is it easier to apply the colour, but it looks much better too, especially on the Mix window.

And speaking of the Mix window, this has also been redesigned, although the functionality remains pretty much the same, which is no bad thing. One slight improvement to the mixer architecture that those working on large mixers will be particularly happy about, though, is that you can now have up to 10 inserts per channel, by displaying a second bank of five inserts as you could previously do with sends.

Initially, I didn't really like the look of the new Mix window, especially with the circular pan controls for stereo panning, but it grew on me as I worked with the application.

Overall, the new user interface is definitely welcome in Pro Tools 8. It's pleasant to look at, and, more importantly, offers better contrast and clarity when compared to previous versions.

Existing users will need a few moments to reorient themselves, but on the whole I think both these users and newcomers alike will consider the new interface an improvement. I do have a couple of minor criticisms, though.

Firstly, I really don't like the dark nature of the scroll bars, which results in a 'dark grey against light grey' appearance. We did not wait for a law to make us respect our members and visitors' privacy.

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Digidesign has also expanded the number of simultaneous audio tracks to In this example, I want to copy the selected part of the Region on the bottom Playlist to the master Playlist on the track. Here you can see before above and after right using the 'Copy Selection To Main Playlist' button, which is enabled in the first picture because a selection has been made on a Region on that lane. However, as was the case when working with automation in previous versions, the one thing that would have made Playlists even better was the ability to see more than one of them at a time for a single track, saving you from losing your train of thought when copying and pasting between different Playlists.

So, just as you can now view multiple lanes of automation simultaneously in Pro Tools 8 as discussed last month , you can also now view multiple Playlist lanes, and I think this is going to make a large number of Pro Tools operators really, really happy.

The first thing to mention is that the way in which Pro Tools 8 displays multiple Pro Tools lanes is completely separate from the way it displays multiple automation lanes, making it possible to see everything at once, as it were. To view multiple Playlists, you simply choose the Playlists Track view, and Pro Tools will display a lane for each Playlist underneath the track above the automation lanes ; it's even possible to change the order in which the Playlist lanes appear, by dragging them around.

However — and this is rather brilliant — you don't always have to see every Playlist for a track if this isn't what you want. Say you're comping a particular vocal line in a chorus from four different Playlists, but your vocal track contains 40 Playlists because of multiple takes performed in other parts of the song.

What the Playlists view enables you to do is make an edit selection — where your chorus is, for example — and then tell Pro Tools only to display the Playlists on that track that contain one or more Regions within the current edit selection. This is obviously really handy, and not only does the Playlists View offer other commands for filtering which Playlists are visible, but Playlist lanes also appear in the main Track List, where their visibility can be toggled in the same way as any other track in the Session.

When you're trying to figure out which parts of each take you like, you can now listen to a different Playlist without having to select it on the track. Each Playlist lane has a solo button, which, if enabled, causes that Playlist to be heard instead of the selected Playlist. This works independently of the existing track solo buttons, enabling you to try out different takes in the context of the mix. Once you've figured out that you want to copy a section of one take to the master take, each lane also offers a handy 'Copy Selection To Main Playlist' button, which becomes enabled on Playlist lanes where an edit selection has been made.

So once you've made a selection you want to add to the main Playlist, simply click this button or use the contextual menu or key command and Pro Tools pastes it into the main Playlist for you. Piece of cake! One of the features I always liked about the way you used Playlists to deal with multiple takes is that you could add a Playlist to record a new take at any time, without being tied to only being able to record multiple takes when in cycle mode, which has been the case in some other applications over the years.

However, should you want to use cycle recording in Pro Tools 8, this method of recording multiple takes is now more easily supported thanks to a new Preference option called Automatically Create New Playlists When Loop Recording.

As you might expect, this automatically creates a new Playlist for each pass when loop recording, although this feature is actually disabled by default. At one point I found myself wishing for a priority playback system for the lanes, whereby you could preview a comp without having to copy sections from other Playlists to the master Playlist. But while this would be useful, it would go against the established behaviour of Playlists, so I think Digidesign have done exactly the right thing.

Pro Tools 8 is perhaps the most significant release of the Pro Tools software in the product's history. Not only have Digidesign made an incredible effort to court a larger part of the music creation market, with features like the new MIDI editor and Score windows, but they have also made countless improvements in almost every area of the application, including a complete overhaul of the user interface.

This makes it very hard to write a simple conclusion, since Pro Tools means so many things to many different types of users. If your interest is music creation, Pro Tools 8 clearly has a great deal to offer. While many anticipated the inclusion of a proper, graphical MIDI editor in Pro Tools at some point, it probably surprised a great many people to find that Digi have added a Score editor as well, and one that incorporates the notation rendering capabilities of Sibelius.

And while the notation editing capabilities are quite limited at this point, they probably fulfil enough of a Pro Tools user's needs, allowing you to knock out a quick part in the middle of a session, and there's always the option of exporting your Session as a Sibelius file for more detailed editing. If you're already working with MIDI in Pro Tools, the new MIDI editor will clearly be a blessing; but if you're thinking of coming to Pro Tools for music creation for the first time, there are a number of points to consider.

Firstly, although being able to work with MIDI data in a dedicated editor window is a dramatic improvement, the MIDI editor window in Pro Tools 8 definitely lacks some of the sophistication found in competing products. However, this may not be an issue if the simplicity of the approach appeals to you, and if the level of functionality is above the threshold you need to get work done.

The thing that really bothers me about the MIDI editor window, though, as mentioned last month, is the fact that your editing workflow becomes harder as the number of MIDI tracks being displayed increases. While it would seem like a good idea to display velocity, automation and controller data for all visible tracks, in practice, it just makes the editor too cluttered. The reason you want to see the notes superimposed from multiple tracks is to clearly see harmonic structure, not just to see an abundance of notes.