A few days ago we ran a straw poll with the Pro Tools community asking them 'Pro Tools 12.4 What Are Your Upgrade Plans? This followed on from Avid, the makers of Pro Tools, announcing Pro Tools 12.4 with various features added. You can read more about what's new in Pro Tools 12.4 here
In August we asked a similar question and gave a comparison with earlier polls
When the first poll was conducted Avid had announced Pro Tools 12.1 and announced that it would now include the following features for owners of Pro Tools 12 native:
128 audio tracks
512 instrument tracks
Input monitoring
Copy to send feature for fast set-up of headphone mixes
Native support for HEAT when used with HD licence
Solo tracks in PFL or AFL
Then on the 2nd of September Avid announced Pro Tools 12.2 with the following additions to the deal:
Pro Tools 12.2 Vanilla
Now includes the Avid Space convolution reverb and the 16 stomp box plug-ins
Pro Tools 12.2 HD
In addition all HD users will now get all the Pro Series plug-ins
Pro Compressor
Pro Expander
Pro Limiter
Pro Multiband Dynamics
Pro Subharmonic
Revibe
Reverb One
Avid also announced a reduction in the price of plans meaning that many Pro Tools native users could upgrade from as little as $99 per year.
Pro Tools 12.3 was released at the end of October with:
Commit Track
Drag And Drop MIDI Commit
Clip Transparency And Fade Improvements
Pro Tools 12.1 Poll - Has It Made A Difference?
Pro Tools 12.3 - What Are Your Upgrade Plans?
Pro Tools 12.4 - What Are Your Upgrade Plans
As with the previous poll the number of those upgrading has continued to rise, now at 72% which was at 34% when our first poll took place. The votes for this poll were pretty much even between both Pro Tools HD and Vanilla users.
It seems that delivering features in a timely manner is what keeps customers spending money... no shit Sherlock!
Avid can learn a lot from the events of 2015, mostly about under-promising and over-delivering and communicating with customers in clear ways. None of this is rocket science, in fact it's all business school 101, Avid may have kept some customers but they have a lot more to do to restore brand credibility.
We do have to note that unless a minor miracle happens in the next few days Avid failed to deliver the Cloud Collaboration features in Pro Tools in 2015 - this is more a point of detail in terms of what Avid promised to deliver - in most cases many Pro Tools users won't lose any sleep over this omission.
Discuss.