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Developer's Description By M-Audio. Session compatibility with all current versions of Pro Tools software means that you can easily move your projects between pro, project and mobile personal studios.
Pro Tools M-Powered is the serious music production choice for power, compatibility, options and ease of use. Full Specifications. What's new in version 8. Release October 22, Date Added October 22, Version 8.
Operating Systems. Additional Requirements None. Total Downloads 4, Downloads Last Week 0. Report Software. Related Software. Balabolka Free. Audacity Portable Free. Edit your digital audio files right from any portable storage device. Magix Music Maker Plus Free to try. Produce music by dragging and dropping sounds and edit with professional audio effects. However, the sheer physical size of the thing can be a nuisance — the two USB ports on my laptop are positioned in such a way that it's impossible to insert a USB pen drive at the same time as the iLok.
The Mix window in Pro Tools provides a standard 'virtual mixer', although nearly all of the same functions can be accessed from the Edit window. As well as the dongle itself, which comes in a fetching shade of red, the box includes Windows and Mac installation CDs, a brief Getting Started manual and an even briefer Basics Guide.
These are reproduced in PDF form on the discs, along with the full manual and various other bits of documentation.
I've always found Digidesign's product manuals, especially the Pro Tools Reference Guide, to be among the best around, but it would be handy to have this in paper form too. It would also be nice if the Reference Guide had been updated to cover Pro Tools M-Powered, which has been given the version number 6. Pro Tools M-Powered does, however, include the major features that were added to the LE version in the 6. The idea that you can take your hard drive into almost any studio in the world and have your recordings ready to mix or overdub will be a major selling point.
Installation is fairly straightforward, and although it does demand a couple of tweaks to System Properties settings, the manual does a fairly good job of holding your hand through the process.
Getting your M-Audio interface up and running with Pro Tools requires that you install the WDM driver, which is equally straightforward. Plug the iLok key in, navigate the Found New Hardware wizard yet again, and you're ready to go.
It's probably best not to get too excited about such thrillers as DC Offset Removal and Normalize, but most of the Digirack tools will come in handy sooner or later. The compressors and equalisers are usable, if not exactly characterful, and D-Verb is more versatile than most bundled reverbs. What's more, all the real-time plug-ins are also available in off-line Audiosuite versions, and if you run out of processing grunt, it's always been easy to copy your settings from the one to the other and apply them permanently.
Perhaps Digidesign should give this function a snowflake logo and a catchy name — something like 'Freeze' should do the trick. As with all current versions of Pro Tools, you also get a selection of plug-ins from the Bomb Factory line, which was bought up by Digidesign a whille back. Most of these fulfil useful but unglamorous functions such as clip removal and metering; the highlight for most users will be BF76, a recreation of the classic Universal Audio compressor. The basic features of Pro Tools have been covered in SOS many times before, so I won't go into detail here except on points that are specific to the M-Powered version.
As ever, almost all recording and editing functions are carried out in one of two windows: the Edit window shows each track arranged along a horizontal timeline, while the Mix window displays the same tracks as channels in a virtual mixer, with faders, pan controls, aux sends, inserts and so on.
Seasoned Pro Tools users will know that you can actually accomplish almost everything within the Edit window, which makes a welcome change from those applications that open a new window if you so much as sneeze at them.
Audio can be recorded at or bit and at sample rates up to 96kHz. Unlike most DAWs, Pro Tools doesn't include any template setups for typical tasks like multitrack recording or stereo editing, so the first time you start it up and open a new Session, the Edit and Mix windows will be blank until you create tracks to fill them. You can have up to mono or stereo audio tracks, but like current LE versions, PTMP provides only 32 'voices' — playing back a mono track requires a single voice, whilst a stereo track will use two — so 96 of these must be considered 'virtual' tracks.
As well as audio and Aux tracks, there are also 16 mono audio busses, which can be paired to make up to eight stereo busses as appropriate. The output of any track can be routed either to an output on your audio interface or to a buss, and each track also features five Aux sends which can likewise be routed to any output or buss. Aux input tracks can be fed from any audio input or any buss, and if you want to have three aux sends feeding one half of a stereo Aux track and two feeding the other, before sending from that Aux track to the key input of a plug-in on another track and routing all of the resulting mess to another buss feeding another Aux track, no problem.
Once you've created some tracks, they should be available for recording straight away, with input and output routings automatically assigned by Pro Tools and visible in its mixer.
As far as the M-Powered version is concerned, however, there seems to be a tiny fly in the ointment. When I booted it for the first time, I was able to select inputs only on stereo tracks — whenever I created a mono track, all the possible inputs were greyed out. This means that the natural way to set things up is to use a stereo Input Path for every pair of inputs, with mono Sub-paths for each half of each stereo Path.
This has always been the default in my TDM system, and according to the Reference Guide, the same should be true of Pro Tools M-Powered — there's even a dedicated Default button which is supposed to return you to that state. In my system, though, the default setting most often created a stereo Path for each input and output, but no Sub-paths I say 'most often' because sometimes it did work properly on the inputs, though never with the busses.
The upshot of this is that no mono inputs are available for selection within the Pro Tools mixer; and likewise, no mono destinations are available on Aux sends. Annoyingly, anything that does have to be done in the Control Panel requires that you quit out of Pro Tools in order to do it, though the same is true of any other audio application running with M-Audio hardware.
What will be more annoying for many users is that the Direct Monitoring options in interfaces such as the Firewire are not supported in Pro Tools M-Powered. In other applications such as Cubase SX, these allow you to route input signals directly to the interface's outputs with negligible latency, so that you can hear what you're playing without the aid of unwanted slapback delay. Pro Tools LE provides a similar function with the interface, but unless you have a hardware mixer or similar that you can use to set up an all-analogue monitor path, you'll will be stuck with the Elvis effect when recording in Pro Tools M-Powered.
At the default sample buffer size, the latency will certainly be noticeable, and the smallest buffer size available is a rather conservative samples, which equates to a latency of around 6ms at Pro Tools is a versatile piece of software, but its central application is still recording, editing and mixing multitrack audio, and I took the opportunity to test the M-Powered version in a real session. For a while now, I've had my eye on an attic room at my dad's house, which I had always thought would make a beautiful acoustic environment for tracking a band live.
The difficulty had always been finding musicians foolish enough to let me do this, but I solved this problem by starting a band of my own.
As luck would have it, the review copy of Pro Tools M-Powered turned up the day before our session, and — throwing caution to the winds — I decided to press it into action. We encountered more than our fair share of problems on the day, the low point being a power glitch which took out an eight-channel analogue-to-digital converter and a ring main.
Forced to rely only on the Firewire 's unbalanced analogue inputs, we then ran into horrendous ground-loop interference, and the only way we could record anything at all was to disconnect the laptop from the mains and run it on battery power. Despite all of these setbacks, Pro Tools M-Powered held up pretty well under pressure. The input routing anomaly described above caused a certain amount of cursing, and I also became frustrated with how long it took to open even a fairly simple Session with few tracks and no recorded audio.
Even when my laptop was on the verge of giving out, PTMP was faithfully capturing the 'low battery' beep, and although the interface became a little sluggish, every single take was recorded perfectly. Pro Tools M-Powered has not crashed once since I've installed it, and has behaved as predictably and reliably as you'd hope. Internet folklore has it that the Windows version is inferior to the Mac original, but I experienced nothing to suggest that this is the case.
Whereas programs such as Logic began life as MIDI sequencers and added audio recording at a later date, Pro Tools has gone the other way.
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