Pro Tools: Digital Audio Workstation

Pro Tool is a digital audio workstation that simulates a multi-track tape machine with digital recreation. It was released in 1991 by Digidesign to provide a substitute for the high price of Analog tape. Pro Toll has been the leader in the DAW industry for a decade but there have been others that prove to be just as affective as Pro Tools including Cubase, Logic, Sound Track, and others. It is now designed to be used with Macintosh and Windows operating systems. It comes in 3 basic formats M-powered, LE, and HD. HD (or sometimes called TDM) is the most versatile and powerful. This is used for Professional recording studios and Production facilities. LE witch is now the most popular is for average consumers. This runs off of the processing power of you host computer. M-powered is basically LE with a different connection that can support Firewire and PCI functions.

Pro Tools
This DAW has the ability to save lots of time with audio recording. One of its brightest functions is to record live. With certain inputs you can non-destructively record multiple inputs. That means I can record the guitar, bass, vocals, snare, kick, Keys all separate. This comes in handy for live albums without much effort. Another function is that you never waist takes. Some of the reasons that many people are switch from analog to digital are because it saves a lot of money. It never cost extra to save a botched take of extra instruments. What some engineers try to do is add tape saturation to the audio so it still sound like it was recorded with tape. It can never sound the same but with technology getting more advanced with regards to sample rates and bit depths. Pro Tools can be used to edit video as well. It comes with software included to read an edit sound to QuickTime supported video. This gives it a two for one advantage in Music and Post Production. Newer versions have the ability to mix in surround sound edit by scrubbing frames to picture. Pro Tools separates from the others with its advanced editing and mixing capability. You have the most detail options when editing in Pro Tools. You can shape any sound to whatever you want. You can save presets and automate any parameter in the program. The big part of the mixing process is internal routing. I can route any signal to any aux, instrument, or audio track.