The strengths and limitations of Pro Tools HD as a music production Essay

The strengths and limitations of Pro Tools HD as a music production system - Essay Example The major benefit Pro Tools is that it can be run alone, and can also operate very well using a large assortment of external A/D converters and/or internal Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) (Webopedia) or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) audio cards with onboard digital signal processor DSP (Dyer and Harms). In essence, Pro Tools similar to most other softwares of Digital Audio Workstation is very much like a tape recorder that is multi-track and has a mixer. There are several other added features that can perform their function only in the digital domain. Pro tools supports all of 16-bit, 24-bit and the 32-bit float audio at several different sample rates of which the maximum is 192 kHz. Pro tools can also well handle Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) ( IBM Corporation and Microsoft Corporation), Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF), AIFC, WMA, mp3 and SDII audio files as well as the QuickTime video files. A prominent feature of Pro tools is its time code, elast ic audio, tempo maps, automation and the surround sound capabilities. Pro Tools was initially developed by Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks, both graduates of UC Berkeley. Majors of computer sciences and electrical engineering, Pro Tools began in 1984 as just a sound designer whose original purpose was to tidy up sounds for the E-MU keyboard (emulator archive). Both Brooks and Gotcher tried merging Pro Tools with E-MU. This proposition was rejected and lead to the invent of Digidesign (Brooks) now known as Avid technology. Sound Tools originally began on the 20th of January in the year 1989 at the National Association of Music Merchandisers (NAMM). Initially, it was just a simple tool that was computer based and was uses as a stereo audio editor. The software had tremendous amount of potential which was limited by the technology of hard drives (NAMM.org). The first album which was recorded and edited as well as mixed entirely with the aid of Pro Tools was The Beach Boys ‘summer i n Paradise’ in the year 1991. The album was released 1992. "Livin la Vida Loca" a song by Ricky Martin was released in the year 1999 and was the first ever song edited and mixed on Pro Tools to reach the stature of the No. 1 single. Version 2.0 of garbage was the first ever Pro Tool edited album to win a nomination for Grammy awards in the category of ‘Album of the Year’. The entire album was solely edited and mixed with the help of Pro Tools. Eventual successes as these go on to prove the success and usefulness of Pro Tools. There are several recording artists that now prefer to record their songs without the help of Pro Tools. A prominent such name is Jack White belonging to The White Stripes who argued that this tool was not highly appropriate for the purposes of recording music. He was perhaps right in saying that tools such as these were destroying the true essence of recorded music. It made fixing of the mistakes too easy recording artist and the end result or the recorded song was more of a Pro Tool fix up then the artistic effort by the recording artist. He was also right to say that Pro Tools produced the end result so perfect that music instead of sounding like it was sung by someone sounds all the same because of the near to perfect qualities added into it. He was of the opinion that this was not what music was about and it shouldn’t be what people have to hear. They had a right to know music in