Pro Tools’ first new release of 2019 is here and a lot of the changes are under the hood, for example the bug fix list is pleasingly long. We have a full detailed report on the new features but you can see the most prominent changes in action in this free tutorial video.

Increased voice count for Pro Tools Ultimate Standalone and Pro Tools HD Native users with Ultimate software

384 simultaneous voices/audio tracks (up from 256) and the option to add voice packs in blocks of 128 simultaneous voices/audio tracks up to a maximum of 768 voices matching the maximum number of voices for an HDX3 system.

Users with Pro Tools Ultimate standalone software and Pro Tools HD Native hardware with Pro Tools Ultimate 2019.5 software will be able to purchase or rent voice packs in blocks of 128 voices up to a maximum of 768 voices at 48K sample rate.

Pro Tools Will No Longer Stop When Undertaking Tasks Like Creating Tracks, Adding Or Moving Plug-ins (For Pro Tools First, Pro Tools And Pro Tools Ultimate Users)

Track interactions

• Add/Remove track

• Duplicate track

• Make the track active/inactive

• Drag track up/down

• Set/remove track input

• Set/remove track send

• Drag track send between slots/tracks

• Activate/Deactivate track send

• Set/remove track output

• Activate/Deactivate track output

• Drag insert between slots/tracks

• Change input monitoring on track

Timeline interactions during playback

• Dynamic Transport on/off

• Loop on/off

• Link/Unlink edit and play

• Select clip 

• Make timeline selection

• Drag timeline selection

• Drag timeline selection start/end point

• Select half

• Select double

• Change loop from transport window

• Change tempo

• Change tempo from transport window

• Draw tempo curve

Name Tracks Faster (For Pro Tools First, Pro Tools And Pro Tools Ultimate Users)

With Pro Tools 2019.5 you will be able to name new tracks as you create them, there is now a new “Name” field in the New Track dialog. This makes it faster and easier to name multiple new tracks whilst you are creating the new tracks rather than have to name them after you have created them. But don’t worry, if you forget to give a new track a name in the New Track window, Pro Tools will still automatically create a default name for you, and the default name will respect the track type, making it easy to understand what type of track it is if you forget to name one.

New Arrow Key MIDI Editing Key Commands Enhancement

The MIDI editing functions for the arrow key shortcuts, are enabled only when users really need them.

• Pro Tools 2018.1 introduced new MIDI editing shortcuts that utilised the arrow keys, which enabled faster editing of MIDI notes. Because these keyboard combinations are shared with various existing commands, the shortcut functionality would switch depending on the data types contained in the edit insertion or selection.

• The MIDI editing functionalities are now enabled when the edit insertion or selection is only on tracks that are in Notes or Velocity views.

• You can check the Pro Tools Shortcuts guide “MIDI Note Editing” section for a full list of the key combinations.