When I was a kid, my Dad used to say that he wouldn't make it to forty, he was kind of joking. He smoked at the time, and it's possible his prediction could have come true but he took the advice of our doctor and made it to forty. In his forties, he told us that fifty was unlikely. He said that sixty was questionable in his fifties. It became a bit of a family joke, although my Dad is not a hypochondriac, on the contrary, he is one of the most consistently hard working and reliable people I know. My Dad has never been one to let illness get in the way of hard work.
This blog has been running for a decade, and it seems to be the case that for as long as it has been running there has been endless predictions about the death of Pro Tools. The predictions are 99% of the time made by those pissed off with Avid for doing, or not doing, (fill in the blank) which leads them to make their 'Pro Tools is finished' predictions. It seems to be based on some logic (forgive the pun) that if Avid isn't making me happy, or if Pro Tools keeps crashing on my computer or doesn't have that one feature I've been asking for since I was in grade 1 at school, then the death of Pro Tools is inevitable.
And even if some don't predict the end of Pro Tools, then they take every opportunity they can to comment on their favourite gripe. You can run a story on anything related to Pro Tools and before you know it there's someone cutting and pasting their grievance, at least I hope they are saving the thing they must have posted hundreds of times, as only a moron would keep typing the same complaint again and again. If your claim is that important that you need to take every opportunity to make the same comment, then at least save yourself some time and keep a copy of it to paste into the next story you find which has the word Pro Tools in it.
I'm not saying that Pro Tools is perfect, those who know something about my journey will know I also use PreSonus Studio One some of the time because of the deficiencies that Pro Tools has when it comes to music creation. Of course, this is also down to my particular way of working, for some the music creation tools in Pro Tools are just fine. But for me, Pro Tools wasn't working, and I got tired of complaining and being pissed off with Avid, so I decided to do something about it.
Those who don't like things about Pro Tools or Avid and then predict its death are like spurned lovers who predict the end of the ex-lover, 'if they can't make me happy then they will never succeed.' Or the person fired from a company who spends their life predicting and hoping for the company to go bust, however, it rarely happens. I know I've done it, thinking that 'without me they are nothing!' Over time you come to your senses, and you realise that the world doesn't revolve around you... honestly. Despite the best hopes of some aggrieved Pro Tools users, Pro Tools will do just fine with or without our blessing - take that from a Pro Tools evangelist who started using Studio One.
What seems to be part of the problem is that people often equate the Avid corporation with Pro Tools and they extrapolate their dissatisfaction with the company who develop the software with the Pro Tools software itself. Of course, a company like Avid with hundreds of thousands of users isn't going to make every one of them happy all the time, in fact, on that scale, it's more likely that a larger number of people will be unhappy for some of the time, if not an extended time. It's the same for Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Samsung et al. when you are dealing with hundreds of thousands or even millions of users then the chance of keeping them all happy is zero. Take that from someone who realised that once the blog had more than one reader, then I was not going to make everybody happy ever again.
I want to be clear; there are genuine grievances about the software, the support or the value proposition of Pro Tools, as already stated I've had my concerns, but spending all your time taking every opportunity to trot out the same complaint ad nauseam is unlikely to help you. Predicting the death of Pro Tools certainly won't help. Will that ever come true? Perhaps, Spike Milligan quipped on his gravestone "I told you I was ill." Nothing lasts forever, but that's not the same thing.
Now some of you may be reading this thinking 'who the hell is Mark Twain? Mark Twain was an American writer who once found that a newspaper article had been written announcing his death. In his inimitable way, Twain responded by saying "Say the report is greatly exaggerated", he is often misquoted as saying "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."
Perhaps you are wondering about my Dad, well he's alive and well and now in his mid-eighties, some 40 years on from his original concerns about seeing out the decade.
It seems that even after what seems like an eternity of endless chatter in forums and on social media, Pro Tools continues to be the DAW of choice for many users. That's going to make some of you mad, fuelled by genuine anger and disappointment at the route Avid has taken with Pro Tools over the last few years, from our recent survey that number could be as high as 45% of the user base; I'm certainly not trying to diminish your genuine concerns. But take my advice and use the passion that fuels that anger to do something constructive instead, after all the trouble with a grudge is that most of the time the person you are mad at doesn't even know about it.
I found a second DAW to reduce my need to shout at the screen every time Pro Tools lost a session or threw up a cryptic error code that sucked all the life out of my creative moment. Now I spend my time being creative instead of using every opportunity to post how pissed off I am.
It may surprise you to know that the very same conversations are taking place about Studio One, Cubase, Logic Pro, in fact, every piece of software on the planet. There's no such thing as the perfect software, certainly not one that suits everyone.
It's essential that those who create the things we depend on, are held to account. We give you our word that we'll continue to use the influence we have of being such a vast global Pro Tools community to make sure Avid hears from you, we will continue to light a fire under Avid when the need arises. We have a revitalised relationship with the Avid team, and to give them credit this is partly due to a new management team who want to get it right, we think they have a team in place now who can make things better.
A word of caution, change on this scale doesn't happen overnight, for some it may be too late and time to move on, but for those of you who still love Pro Tools and want it to flourish then take it from us that reports of the death of Pro Tools are greatly exaggerated.