2016 has been a very exciting year for 8dB Sound – I’ve moved studios, added a voice over booth / ADR recording area and upgraded to 7.1. There has actually been a whole raft of products that would fall into my “most used” category this year, so I’ve boiled it down to one "pair" of products - Pro Tools 12 HD on Windows 10 Pro.

I took the plunge with both of these simultaneously – jumping to Pro Tools 12.3 HD / Windows 10 straight from 11 HD / Win 7, against the advice of Avid, who didn’t qualify Pro Tools for Windows 10 until 12.5.

I’m really glad I did both together. Commit has become one of my most used features, especially when working with other facilities. The continued development of Pro Tools means that playback stability and reliability keeps improving, and it keeps on taking full advantage of my 12 core Windows "beast". I’ve stayed at 12.4 for the moment as I’ve been mid project, and had no need for the Avid Cloud Collaboration feature. 

I first took a look at Pro Tools 12HD on Windows 10, back in January 2016. There was a lot of debate over whether it would work, and reliably, so I gave it a go.

Windows 10 Pro provides a slick but solid and reliable base for Pro Tools 12HD to work in. It gives your host DAW easy access to the myriad of resources modern PCs have to offer. Disk access is lightning fast, the filing system is far more intuitive than OS X and third party hardware such as BlackMagic, works a lot more efficiently under Win 10.

Avid and Microsoft have proved during 2016, that you don't need to revert to "the usual suspects" when putting together a Post Production DAW system.