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[Lee Flier]

Hmm... I have used PTHD on both PC and Mac, and I'm a lot more used to working on PC's because that's what I use for business apps... but I haven't noticed that it's really any different on Mac vs. PC, and I didn't have any additional trouble learning the software or hardware because of it being on a Mac.  Nor did I see any difference in stability/reliability.

I agree with you that it sucks to have to use it at all, but if you're going to, I don't think it's a big deal to go with Mac.

[recorderman]

 

[djui5]

Aaron,
I know you love your pc...so keep it. Get them to buy a mac for the PT's rig. Use both. There's no reason not to. Mac's are really easy to use and you could figure it out in a day at the most. I'd be more than happy to come over and sit with you for a while if that's what it takes.
If you wanna run Pt's on a PC...then you can. The problem I see is that most PT's sessions are created and modified on mac's, and if I understand things correctly, if someone forgets to hit that "enforce mac/pc compatability" button, then your PC won't read the files. Fun.
As for monitors, why not have 4 monitors? 2 for the PC and 2 for the mac It would look impressive if anything.

[djui5]

pipelineaudio wrote on Sun, 24 April 2005 19:14

Whats the deal with converters? Why do you need to run thru an X-HD card for apogee? Why cant you just go adat or aes out of an apogee into the digital ins of PT ?

This card plug's into the Apogee and has a connection for the Pro-Tools interface cable that hooks up to the digidesign PCI cards. This prevents you from having to buy more interfaces. You do have to have one Digi interface though, so you could get a 192 I/O from digi, then buy everything else you need from Apogee.
To be honest, I'd just go with the 192's for everything (not the 96 I/O's). 2 of them gives you 24 I/O and the converters sound great. Spending the money for Apogee isn't going to be worth it. Do get a Big Ben for clocking though.

[David Schober]

So Aaron,

Why not enlighten us as to what this mystery system to which you refer?  My suspicion is that if what you say is true, you've been around incompetent PT operators.  I've been around almost all pro DAWs and while each of them do have certain things they do better than others...with a good operator, it's really no big deal.  They all can do the job quickly.

With the claims you've made of this mystery system, you dug yourself in a bit of a pit.  I'd be surprised to hear you have something that any of us would agree that is that much inherently faster that PT.  

You been given a good bit of good will here with guys trying to help you out.  However, it appears to me the issue isn't really pc/mac pt.  The issue would appear to be you're digging in your heels because you don't want to be told what to use.  If your clients pick this up, that may be a problem for you in areas that have nothing to do with the sounds you make.

Bottom line, if you can't get emotionally behind this, then don't do it.  But if you put a bit of positive emotion, you'll be fine....and you might even learn something.

As for the PC-PT thing...I'd recommend not trying to reinvent the wheel.  The 192 sounds fine.  There have been plenty of double blind tests where well respected engineers give it an equal or better rating than than anything else.  If you do your job, you'll have no problems.  Just hit the Digi website and be sure to use approved computer parts.

Lastly, one of the early posts by Ryan was right on.  Get someone good to help you put a system together and get it up and going.  There's a lot of uneeded head banging you'll avoid if you do that.  Also, on the Digi website, the Digi User Conference has Q&A on many things you'll run up against as well as setup guidelines.  

I started to put the DUC link here, but I see you're already in there.  Looks like you're getting pleny of good help.

By the way, the phrase you put there as well as here, "Being forced to use PTHD" isn't the best way to encourage someone to help.  You're kind of putting up a signal that you'll be hard to help.

Best of luck anyway.

[Bob Olhsson]

Get the PC.

If I remember right, even the enforce mac/pc compatibility problem is no longer an issue with the latest version. If it is, all you need to do is e-mail the session file to somebody with a mac and have them convert it. Another thing you could do is to buy a $200 used system X Mac and an M-box. You can convert any and all sessions using that even if it can't play that many tracks at once.

I switched from Mac system 9 to XP and have had fewer problems than all of my friends who went with System X. Five years ago you really needed a Mac to run PT but today it's a non-problem.

[pipelineaudio]

theres no mystery, its Vegas.

it may be that I have been around incompetent PT users, and may be able to speed up like hell, which would be great.


So in PT how do I do these?

1. Auto crossfades. Just drag one event over another and have it put a crossfade through the overlap, no button pushing no nothing. This seems to be the number one time waster for the PT operators I have been exposed to. If they just dont know how to turn on autocrossfades, then they are incompetent indeed, yet I looked through the manual and searched the forums and cannot find how to turn on auto crossfades.

2. Drag and drop any type of media file into any spot on the arrange window, and be able to use it immediately, no other windows, no waiting no nothing.

3. See the meter at any time, with numbers to go with them for calibration purposes. I see the cal mode which in honesty is awesome, but in normal working in the arrange I cant see numbers, just a very vague meter that doesnt respond very quickly(maybe theres a meter speed option?)

4. Select non contiguous events on the same track and group them together. Select non contiguous events on a few tracks and group them together

5. Mouse wheel zoom? I think I can use a macro thingy to do it though. I see if you hit some buttons them mouse wheel you can zoom, but thats a little cludgy for me.

[pipelineaudio]

I think no matter what the PC mac thing will be ok as we already have a mac setup running pthd. But I do wish to get "macopen" and David or whatever its called for the network

[David Schober]

As I said Aaron,

There are many things that any system will do that another can't.  You listed a few things that Vegas can do well and they do sound like great features.  However, once you spend some time with PT you'll find things that are a part of that system that can't be done on others.

You're going to just get over it.   It's useless to start listing features of one system over another.  You list five that only Vegas can do...the next guy lists 6 that only PT can do, the Nuendo guy lists 10 things that only it can do....yada yada...so what???  All of these systems work and at some point you just gotta make some music.

The fact is EVERY DAW, analog console, keyboard, mic, compressor, or girlfriend you ever had, will have their good points and bad ones.  If you get into comparing a few specific features and not see the whole then you'll just be pissed off all the time instead of seeing what IS good about each one....and besides, you'll just sound like a whiner instead of a professional who gets the job done.

[Bob Olhsson]

MacDrive seems to be the PC utility of choice. Lets you read and write to Mac drives, CDs and DVDs.

Protools does everything except that kind of auto crossfade. (It does do a 10 ms. auto crossfade when you throw an edit together.) The smart mouse lets me create crossfades of any length just about as fast as I can in Samplitude using the method you describe. You can do very tricky stuff with fades by simply duplicating the track with a keyboard stroke and then treating each fade in and out seperately.

There are many ways to do everything in Pro Tools. I almost never watch somebody else without seeing them doing a few things the long way around and learning I'm taking the long way around to do something else.

[pipelineaudio]

Im also not interested in comparing features. The whole point of this thread was that I wanted PT on a PC so that I can OMF over and back to vegas for editing. I dont need to even worry that PT edits different, as with this setup I will do all my editing in an app made for editing, and the rest in PT. No app can be the best at everything, and I would like to use the best tool for each job. Are there those here who would also suggest PT is best for midi? come on. This isnt my dad is bigger than your dad.

I am more than happy to record in PT as the lifesaver feature in "quickpunch" is truly awesome! Tape style auto input monitoring with no latency is also a godsend and one of my major sore points with Vegas. I will be bummed about the loss of so many plugins that I like for mixing, and the fact that certain plugs cannot be used in auxes, but I feel I can make do, I mean back in the old days, with hardware, you only had so many effects at your disposal, so I guess while its a giant step backwards, its not an untennable one. Hopefully someone will make a TDM to DX and TDM to VST adapter, and not just the VST to RTAS one we have now, and then even that will be a moot point.

BTW the autocrossfade in Samplitude, another app I use extensively, is VERY VERY different than the one in Vegas. You can switch Vegas to do it samplitude style, but by default, Vegas autocrossfades the ENTIRE area of overlap, and the area of overlap does not change as you overlap more or less, only the length of the crossfade changes. Both methods have their plusses.

If PT autocrossfades for 10ms, I dont see a way to lengthen the autocrossfade area by just grabbing one edge as you can in Samplitude. Am I missing something? If my edits can be done with the same speed and precision in PT as in vegas or at least as in samplitude, I would perfer to stay in PT, so I will be bugging you guys for tricks.

[LawrenceF]

Quick Punch?  Only Digi could give it's users a feature that should be standard in any audio recorder and call it a "great new feature".  Sorry guys but that was one of the first things I noticed when I bought my PTLE MBox setup a couple of years ago (that I eventually returned).

Isn't that what recorders are supposed to do?

But now they have the great "Quick Punch" mode, and someone actually refers to it as a "lifesaving feature"?

From a PT "Tips" column:

Often, it makes sense to stay in Quick Punch mode so that you can drop into Record at any time. An extra bonus is that when in this mode Pro Tools records audio for all record-enabled tracks from the moment you start playback. This means that you can't miss anything, and can trim back the start of any recorded regions.

"Extra Bonus?" In my "mystery app" if I hit the RECORD button, it begins recording on every record enabled track whether it's already rolling or not.  That's what the RECORD button is for.  And you can punch in and out of any track anytime.  Like any multitrack tape deck.

So what happens in PT when you hit the RECORD button and you're not in "Quick Punch" mode?  Does that mean you can't put another track into record while it's rolling?  They should really fix that.

Jesus Christ.  Have people forgotten how tape decks are supposed to work?  Digi fixed (put a band-aid on) a fundamental flaw and now call it a "special mode"?  I've never owned a tape deck you had to stop to record enable/disable a track under any circumstances.  I'm sure one must have existed WAY back sometime.  

What were they thinking?

Lawrence

[LawrenceF]

wwittman wrote on Sun, 24 April 2005 21:03

Let's say there's a single track that I want to remove from bar 9 through bar 16... in other words joining the end of bar 8 to the downbeat of bar 17... why SHOULD you be able to do that any faster in your mystery program than in ProTools? Unless it has artificial intelligence and voice recognition. Which would be cool.

If it's locked to a specific tempo this is like a 5 second edit in the daw I use.  Even across 20-24-48 tracks.  Two mouse clicks.   It's it not locked to a specific tempo it takes another 10-15 seconds to zoom in and make sure the splits are gonna happen at the right places.  It's called "Remove Range".  Selected track(s) or all tracks.  It removes the highlighted  range and slides everything else back on the track(s).  

Don't underestimate the editing power of some of these other apps.  You can get many things done really fast.  I freely admit that I don't have a pro's level of working knowledge of PT but when I hear people describe things like that I wonder...  how is that done in PT?  

To answer your question I'd have to know.

Lawrence

[sdevino]

pipelineaudio wrote on Sun, 24 April 2005 23:32

So in PT how do I do these? 1. Auto crossfades. Just drag one event over another and have it put a crossfade through the overlap, no button pushing no nothing. This seems to be the number one time waster for the PT operators I have been exposed to. If they just dont know how to turn on autocrossfades, then they are incompetent indeed, yet I looked through the manual and searched the forums and cannot find how to turn on auto crossfades.

You can't as far as I know

Quote:

2. Drag and drop any type of media file into any spot on the arrange window, and be able to use it immediately, no other windows, no waiting no nothing.

This works in PT. Use the Workspace window to browse to the media file. You can play it in the workspace window or drag the file to the PT edit window either straight onto atrack or into free space and it will make a track for you.

Quote:

3. See the meter at any time, with numbers to go with them for calibration purposes. I see the cal mode which in honesty is awesome, but in normal working in the arrange I cant see numbers, just a very vague meter that doesnt respond very quickly(maybe theres a meter speed option?)

Meter speed is partially a function of your CPU and graphics speed. YMMV.  Otherwise you need to go to cal mode to see numbers. My question is why would you want this?

Quote:

4. Select non contiguous events on the same track and group them together. Select non contiguous events on a few tracks and group them together

Learn to use the Select tool in object mode and using markers to preserve selections. You can also use consolidate. In the end its pretty easy if you know how.

Quote:

5. Mouse wheel zoom? I think I can use a macro thingy to do it though. I see if you hit some buttons them mouse wheel you can zoom, but thats a little cludgy for me.

Not sure how to do this.

Get a PC it makes no difference in the end.

[Bob Olhsson]

pipelineaudio wrote on Mon, 25 April 2005 12:55

If PT autocrossfades for 10ms, I dont see a way to lengthen the autocrossfade area by just grabbing one edge as you can in Samplitude.

No but you cab grab any rendered cross fade. With modern computers the fade rendering time is inconsequential.

They have been slowly getting into mouse wheel. About the only real incompatibility is it can't deal with floating point audio files.

I don't bother with OMF and just use broadcast wave for everything. Everything comes right up in sync in Samplitude. With drives so stupid cheap, I just consolidate every  track to the same start time. That way I'm not dependent on ANY application.