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Avid Pro Tools Review

The top audio editing software for PC users

editors choice horizontal
4.5
Outstanding
By Jamie Lendino

The Bottom Line

Avid unlocks Pro Tools for a new generation while maintaining its status as the standard cross-platform solution for professional music, film, games, and broadcast production.

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Pros

  • Still the cleanest audio editing workflow on the planet
  • New, low-cost Artist version is a welcome step forward
  • Melodyne Essential is finally standard
  • Fast 64-bit recording and mixing engine
  • High-end hardware and support policies are tops in the industry

Cons

  • Subscription-only pricing from now on
  • Weak instrument bundle, despite two new additions

Avid Pro Tools Specs

Free Version
Subscription Plan
Audio Tracks 256
Instruments 6
Effects 120
Bundled Content 15 GB
Notation
Pitch Correction
Mixer View

For many musicians, recording engineers, and producers alike—at Abbey Road Studios and Skywalker Sound, right on down to the smallest bedroom studios—Pro Tools feels like home. It's still the best audio editing app for larger studios with lots of outboard hardware and the need for extensive support networks, and its workflow remains second to none. Many users have been critical of Avid's move to a subscription-based support model; now the company has doubled down on this and has gone subscription-only. But coupled with this is the reintroduction of a lower-priced version, meaning that a new generation of up-and-coming engineers can afford to get on board once more. Pro Tools remains our Editors' Choice pick for PC-based recording software; while it's equally awesome on the Mac side, Apple Logic Pro still edges it out there thanks to its robust feature set and unbeatable value.


New Version Structure and Setup

There are three main versions of Pro Tools. The free (and too-restrictive) Pro Tools First has been discontinued. But there are other big changes, so let's break it all down:

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Pro Tools Artist enters on the low end at $9.99 per month or $99 per year. This gets anyone looking to learn Pro Tools in the door, and not just a taste of it either, as with the borderline-useless Pro Tools First. Artist is more akin to the old Pro Tools LE from years gone by and fully usable for professional work. It supports 32 audio tracks, 32 instrument tracks, 32 Aux buses, and 16-channel simultaneous multitrack recording, and it includes more than 100 plug-ins, plus two new instruments I'll get to below.

Artist is geared toward next-generation, entry-level musicians and hobbyists creating electronic, hip-hop, pop, rock, and singer-songwriter-style productions, that maybe need one or two mic inputs to record vocals and guitar, but that otherwise primarily work with MIDI, samples, and loops. This is clearly an attempt to regain customers that may have started with (or left Pro Tools for) Logic Pro, Ableton Live, or FL Studio, among others. Plus, Artist now includes Celemony's excellent Melodyne Essential for pitch correction, remedying another obstacle to choosing Pro Tools over a competing DAW.

The rebranded Pro Tools Studio (formerly Pro Tools), the company's new core music product, costs $39.99 per month or $299 per year. (Note: the annual version is a much better deal, as paying by the month would cost $480 per year in comparison.) With Pro Tools Studio, you can play back up to 512 simultaneous stereo tracks (double the number from before) at up to 192kHz, plus a single video track. Avid has relaxed its track limitations considerably over the years, and when they're this high, I don't think it's a big deal. (Remember when eight-track ADATs and DA-88s were the norm, and pro studios had three linked together for 24 tracks? Or better yet, a Studer 24?) Pro Tools Studio also adds Surround and Dolby Atmos immersive mixing for the first time, Clip FX Editing, and most importantly, some key mixing features and extra plug-ins that I'll get to below.

Avid Pro Tools
Edit and Mix windows

Professional-level customers in larger studios will want to look at Pro Tools Flex (formerly Pro Tools Ultimate), which can be used either natively or with Avid's high-end HDX digital I/O hardware (for still additional cost). Flex is the only version that works with that hardware. It also bumps the audio track count to 2,048, including up to 256 simultaneous record inputs. Flex adds support for multi-layered video edits (with up to 64 tracks!) and broadcast standards, field recorder workflows, video editing, ExpertPlus support, and more that I don't have the space for here. It's far more expensive, though, at $99.99 per month or $999 per year.

The bad news is that Avid no longer sells Perpetual Licenses. Pro Tools is now a subscription product through and through, regardless of version or tier, similar to Adobe's lineup. The good news is that anyone on an active subscription or an existing Perpetual Updates + Support Plan gets upgraded automatically, with all features and content enhancements. In addition, anyone with a Pro Tools or Pro Tools Ultimate Perpetual License keeps it forever. These customers now have two new options: a 1-Year Updates + Support Renewal ($199 for Pro Tools, $399 for Ultimate), and a new "get-current" license called Upgrade (Reinstatement): For $349 (Studio) or $749 (Flex), you can download the latest version of Pro Tools, and you get one year of updates and support.

Avid has always been tight with system requirements as the company certifies versions of Pro Tools for various new hardware releases—and the time necessary for that is far and away the longest in the industry, with most certifications for new OS revisions and hardware model releases taking months. Most recent PCs and Macs are compatible, but you'll need at least Windows 10 or macOS 10.14.6 and 16GB of RAM on either platform; Avid recommends 32GB RAM. For this review, I tested Avid Pro Tools 2022.4 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch (Late 2021, M1 Pro) with macOS Monterey (12.3.1), 16GB RAM, and an internal 1TB SSD.

On the plus side, if you haven't kept up recently, Pro Tools no longer requires a hardware Pace iLok key; users of earlier versions of Pro Tools can enable an iLok Cloud account and free up a prized USB port on their laptops. More good news: Avid has streamlined its download, installation, and startup experiences. I wouldn't call it one-click yet, but it's easier than it was before and faster than that of some competing DAWs.

Avid Pro Tools Audio
Editing audio tracks

Audio Editing

Once you get your head around the peculiarities of your version and what you're paying for it, the actual fun begins. If you've never worked with Pro tools before, it's easy to get your head around. The main interface has two main windows: Edit and Mix. The Edit window, which I'll cover first, handles all recording, arranging, and detailed audio and MIDI editing. If you've used Pro Tools in the past, you already know audio editing is precise and seamless. From loop recording to sample-level editing, to comping together tracks, you can quickly assemble and edit a performance with the combination Smart Tool cursor and apply crossfades—all within the main Edit window.

Avid's Audio Engine features a 64-bit architecture, a low-latency input buffer, and the ability to dynamically allocate host processing resources among dozens of plug-ins. The trick here is that each core doesn't take on load until audio is passing through a given plug-in; just having it loaded and armed won't do it. The System Usage window shows activity on each core during playback. Clip Gain, one of my favorite Pro Tools features, lets you adjust volumes on the fly using a pop-up volume slider, without having to install Gain plug-ins or manually add automation data everywhere. Beat Detective picks up grooves in audio tracks, letting you fix timing issues across multiple instruments. Groove audio editing maintains relevant grid positions when copying, cutting, and pasting unquantized audio and MIDI clips.

You can search through tracks, instruments, and more using a type-ahead search capability, and you can also select multiple items in a menu simultaneously. The program captures performances retroactively if you weren't recording—a small but amazingly useful feature that prevents you from having to remember to press Record when jamming, and then wishing you had (or the reverse, where you clam up once the Record button is pressed and can't capture the initial inspired idea as well).

Avid Pro Tools GrooveCell
GrooveCell

New Instruments and MIDI Recording

Two new virtual instruments debut in Pro Tools version 2022.4—the first new additions since the late 2000s if you can believe it.

GrooveCell is a virtual drum machine and sampler, with an Akai-style pad interface that you can drag and drop samples onto and create custom kits. You can add up to three samples per pad, and tweak the EQ, distortion, pitch, and envelope, as well as cue up preset sound models for drive, dynamics, and even SP-1200 and Korg Super Percussion emulations. GrooveCell comes with a nice 32-step sequencer that you can either use or ignore in favor of regular MIDI recording in Pro Tools. You can develop some seriously detailed grooves that sound unique with this thing. The default mapping assumes pads and not the usual General MIDI layout; trying to play it with a keyboard controller will tie your fingers in knots without reconfiguring the keys.

SynthCell is a two-oscillator, polyphonic synthesizer with two multi-mode filters, envelopes, an LFO, and a built-in arpeggiator with 16 presets and custom controls. Something like this should have been standard years ago, but it's finally here now. Effects include 13 reverb modes, six distortion engines, three choruses, a flanger, a phaser, and 22 different delay modes. In my tests, I found SynthCell has no problem handling anything from warm, thick analog to searing leads, dubstep basses, and everything in between. Avid could have been much more generous with the presets, but dig into the knobs and dials and there's good stuff to be had.

You still get the perennial, if aging Pro Tools workhorses: Xpand2, a workhorse multitimbral workstation plug-in; Boom, a sequencing drum machine; DB-33, a tonewheel organ with a rotating speaker; Mini Grand, a modeled grand piano with several sounds and reverbs, plus variable dynamics via a single knob; Structure Free, which plays back sample-based instruments; and Vacuum, a monophonic "vacuum tube" synthesizer. Instrument track presets make it easy to save preferred virtual instrument plug-in chains. Unfortunately, Falcon and UVI Workstation are no longer bundled with Pro Tools. Overall, the instrument bundle could be much stronger, even counting the two new additions.

Avid Pro Tools SynthCell
SynthCell

Avid improved Pro Tools' MIDI capabilities over the years, though it's still not all the way there. The pop-out MIDI Editor window lets you handle most of the detail work. The built-in Score Editor is derived straight from Sibelius (which Avid acquired in 2006), and you can export Pro Tools sessions as Sibelius files (.sib). The Score Editor still lacks enough symbols for preparing professionally printed scores, but it can print out basic notation parts in a pinch.

Coming back over from Apple Logic Pro, I still miss that program's ability to set minimum and maximum velocity levels on a MIDI track; there's no way to do that easily in Pro Tools. It's also still unnecessarily difficult to do basic things. Setting up a MIDI controller requires diving into multiple, unobvious Preferences dialogs, and you can't easily bring up a virtual instrument from the Edit window. You can certainly compose music with virtual instruments in Pro Tools, but other DAWs remain stronger for this purpose—something that won't matter to the larger pro studios, but that certainly affects bedroom producers on a budget.


Mixing and Post-Production

The Mix window, the second of Pro Tools' two main modes, remains a fabulous place to work, particularly if you have one of Avid's awesome control surfaces, but even just with the mouse cursor. The Mix window displays all your tracks in a mixing board style—and one that's closer to the real thing than Logic Pro and Studio One, particularly when it comes to the way Pro Tools handles aux busses, sends, and returns. Studio One can create those more quickly, but if you think the way a mix engineer thinks, you'll probably still prefer Pro Tools.

Avid Pro Tools Mix
Mix window with Pro Compressor plug-in

Avid added offline bouncing back in version 11, and Pro Tools also offers track freeze and commit features. The mixer supports several metering standards, including peak and average to VU, K, and PPM, for matching up with regional broadcast requirements. You can grab and automate any parameter anywhere across any track. All plug-in automation is time-stamped, and you can write automation while a track is in input or recording.

As part of the base installation, you get plenty of AIR effects that cover all the major bases when mixing. One of my favorites is Avid Channel Strip, an AAX plug-in that mimics Avid's ultra-high-end System 5 console's EQ, dynamics, filter, and gain effects. Although it's not automatically built into every channel, you can always add it. It sounds excellent and is almost infinitely flexible. The included Bomb Factory's BF76 compressor (a Urei 1176 emulation) is nearly spot-on.

Pro Tools Studio and Flex both add some key features and plug-ins that will take your mixes to the next level. These include VCA mixing; advanced metering; the excellent Pro Compressor, Pro Expander, Pro Limiter, and Pro Multiband Dynamics suite of plug-ins; HEAT analog stage modeling; X-Form time stretching, and the Pro Subharmonic low-end booster for cinema-style thunder and kick drums that will give the largest subwoofers a workout. The top two Pro Tools versions also include Space, which offers an array of beautiful-sounding convolution reverbs, complete with multiple photos of the actual room that was recorded in each impulse response file.

The built-in Avid Video Engine lets you edit multiple HD video formats, including RED and Avid DNxHD, from within Pro Tools without transcoding. It also works with Avid Mojo DX, Avid Nitris DX, and a variety of AJA and Blackmagic Design video interfaces for monitoring DNxHD and QuickTime video. Satellite Link synchronizes up to 12 Pro Tools installations, including HDX, HD/TDM, and native. Cloud-based collaboration features from Avid lets up to 10 users work on a single project.

Pro Tools also works exceptionally well importing sessions created in other programs—more so than with any other major sequencer. For example, you can exchange project sessions not only with other Pro Tools users—native or HD, PC or Mac—but also with Logic Pro, Cubase, and Avid Media Composer users. You can also import I/O settings directly from existing projects into new ones. I've done a variety of projects where I've either exported from or imported to Pro Tools to mix; there's plenty of flexibility here for collaboration—if you're willing to put in the extra time to allow for those imports and exports with other DAWs.

As should be obvious from the pricing, Pro Tools scales incredibly well, all the way up to massive Pro Tools HD systems in the largest and most well-specified studios, complete with subscription-based support policies to match, and all while maintaining project compatibility across the board.

Avid Pro Tools MIDI Editing
MIDI Editor window

The Tools Pros Use Most

Despite its various quirks, Pro Tools is as robust and full featured as ever. Although we don't think anyone shopping for a sequencer should base their decision entirely around this, Pro Tools remains the standard DAW in recording and post-production studios across the world. Buying into Pro Tools, in whatever capacity, will mean your projects have the largest potential compatibility base, should you want to work with other musicians, forward a project to a producer, or hire a mixing engineer that wants to look at the actual track data and plug-ins you used, and not just a stack of tracks you exported as individual audio files.

This is literally the point of Avid reintroducing a lower-priced product (now called Artist); learn Pro Tools now, the thinking goes, and you'll be prepared to work anywhere, even if you'll still need to pick up the post-production workflows, how to use SMPTE, or other features reserved for the higher-priced products in whatever studio positions you end up in.

Pro Tools has always been a little slow at adopting features from other DAWs, though. Remember how long it took to get plug-in delay compensation, offline bouncing, and 64-bit compatibility? And as mentioned earlier, Avid takes longer to certify new hardware and OSes for use with the current version of Pro Tools. It's a bit slower moving, this juggernaut of a platform, but in the end, it (usually) means more reliability for professional use.

All told, Avid Pro Tools is a robust effort and our Editors' Choice pick for PC-based recording software. Apple Logic Pro still holds Editors' Choice on the Mac platform because it's a screaming deal at $200; it's easier to compose with, it's packed with plug-ins, and like most Pro Tools competitors, it requires no monthly fees. Several other programs on the PC side, notably Studio One and Cockos Reaper, also offer multi-track audio recording and editing for significantly less money than Pro Tools as well. Studio One's workflow in particular is better suited to individual musicians composing tracks or mixing smaller sessions in a project studio. It's tough to beat Reaper's amazing value and extremely light memory footprint. And this doesn't even get into the more innovative, electronic composition and live performance side of the equation, with such stellar options as Ableton Live and FL Studio (although working in these programs feels very different than working in Pro Tools).

But make no mistake: Pro Tools still holds court as the standard-bearer for cross-platform, high-end digital audio workstations, from bedroom studios right on up to the largest recording studios and post-production houses in the world.

Avid Pro Tools
4.5
Editors' Choice
Pros
  • Still the cleanest audio editing workflow on the planet
  • New, low-cost Artist version is a welcome step forward
  • Melodyne Essential is finally standard
  • Fast 64-bit recording and mixing engine
  • High-end hardware and support policies are tops in the industry
View More
Cons
  • Subscription-only pricing from now on
  • Weak instrument bundle, despite two new additions
The Bottom Line

Avid unlocks Pro Tools for a new generation while maintaining its status as the standard cross-platform solution for professional music, film, games, and broadcast production.

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About Jamie Lendino

Editor-In-Chief, ExtremeTech

I’ve been writing and reviewing technology for PCMag and other Ziff Davis publications since 2005, and I’ve been full-time on staff since 2011. I've been the editor-in-chief of ExtremeTech since early 2015, except for a recent stint as executive editor of features for PCMag, and I write for both sites. I’ve been on CNBC and NPR's All Things Considered talking tech, plus dozens of radio stations around the country. I’ve also written for two dozen other publications, including Popular ScienceConsumer ReportsComputer Power UserPC Today, Electronic MusicianSound and Vision, and CNET. Plus, I've written six books about retro gaming and computing:

Adventure: The Atari 2600 at the Dawn of Console Gaming
Attract Mode: The Rise and Fall of Coin-Op Arcade Games

Breakout: How Atari 8-Bit Computers Defined a Generation

Faster Than Light: The Atari ST and the 16-Bit Revolution

Space Battle: The Mattel Intellivision and the First Console War
Starflight: How the PC and DOS Exploded Computer Gaming 1987-1994

Before all this, I was in IT supporting Windows NT on Wall Street in the late 1990s. I realized I’d much rather play with technology and write about it, than support it 24/7 and be blamed for everything that went wrong. I grew up playing and recording music on keyboards and the Atari ST, and I never really stopped. For a while, I produced sound effects and music for video games (mostly mobile games in the 2000s). I still mix and master music for various independent artists, many of whom are friends.

Read Jamie's full bio

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