Digidesign

5.1 control room current setup

Adam Boardman 5.1 Control Room, FAQ, ProTools , , , , , ,

This post is a technical post describing the setup of the 5.1 control room and the capabilities of it. This isn’t a guideline as such, however it can be helpful to know what you are working with, and how it is all connected together.

This control room is centered around Pro Tools LE 8 and a 003 control surface which at the time of writing is the latest and greatest version from Digidesign, this runs on an Intel iMac with plenty of ‘grunt’ to get the job done. This Pro Tools setup isn’t your standard run of the mill install of LE 8 with limited number of tracks, plug-ins, etc there has been a lot of research and spending gone into this system. We have installed the Digidesign Pro Tools Complete Production Toolkit on this single iMac, giving you 128 mono tracks, a whole array of different mix formats, and over £1000 worth of top of the range plug-ins to name just a few of the features of this toolkit. What this means to you is that instead of being a limited cut down version of Pro Tools (or Light Edition) we are running as close to a full Pro Tools HD / TDM system as we can get without actually having Pro Tools HD / TDM. Continue reading →

What is ProTools?

Adam Boardman Beginner, ProTools ,

ProTools is a software based DAW made by a company called Digidesign which is part of Avid. ProTools is one of, if not the most widely used DAW in the audio industry, it is very powerful and very widely respected by many producers and engineers. Using ProTools is not like using Apple’s Logic Pro for example there is one major difference which can make or break the deal of a potential customer. To use the ProTools software you must also use an approved audio interface.

There are many different versions of the ProTools software, however there are three main groups which are –

  1. ProTools HD / TDM
  2. ProTools LE
  3. ProTools M-Powered

These three different versions all require something different to run and this difference is also reflected in how much you are willing to spend as a user vs. how much power you want out of the system. The audio interface, or interface card in HD / TDM acts as a dongle for the software, which means you will need the serial number and interface to use ProTools. Continue reading →