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

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.