Pro Tools M-Powered, the Ozone and a Slow Train Coming

This feature review story has been a long time coming on AppleProAudio.com. It started last fall when I thought it would be a novel idea to take the Amtrak to the Winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA, which was a 20+ hour trip from the Redding, CA station to Union Station in Los Angeles and involved a sleeper car the size of a small closet. Like this story’s publication, the train is notoriously late. Arriving in the wee hours of the morning to LA, five hours past-due, I was taken to a bus for the final run to Anaheim, which dumped me near the stadium where I took a cab to the Disneyland Hotel for the annual music instrument retail trade show.

Confessions of a Non-Pro Tools User
I’ll fess up, I’m not a big Pro Tools user. Well, not yet. I’m a big Nuendo user, and a Digital Performer user. I use Live 5, Reason 3.x and of late I’ve also been really enjoying using Tracktion2 from Mackie. I’ve got way too much software on the machine and not enough time to use it all. I’ve caught hell-a-plenty from friends, collaborators, colleagues and authors who are Pro Tools fanatics. Here’s why I wasn’t using it and it’s among one of the main reasons I also didn’t use an Apple computer for so long (until OS X swept me off my feet). I did not want to be beholden to one company for my art. I liked that I had the freedom to use whatever hardware I wanted to use with my favorite audio applications. I liked choices. What if I loved the software and hated the hardware? What if I needed a different set of hardware options for I/O and couldn’t use Pro Tools with them? I had nothing against the software or hardware that Digidesign made, it was just my Windows-era mindset that found me actually enjoying taking apart and custom-building rack-mounted computers for my own audio work long before you could buy one pre-made. That’s it. That’s what kept me from using Pro Tools.

The need for the train ride over flying came about primarily following a couple of agonizing (and for most people) routine operations I had in 2005 involving a surgeon arguably trained by Dr. Joseph Mengele, which left air travel somewhat difficult for me for a while. No worry though, the Amtrak can actually be a fun way to get from the northern part of California to the southern part, if you spring for the sleeping accommodations, which allow you not only to sleep and enjoy both hot meals, a shower in the car and privacy as well as an electrical outlet for AC-powered toys. Faced with the bi-annual business need to attend the show, the method of travel I required at the time and 20+ hours in a closet with a fold-down bed, I decided putting to put that time to good use.

Brilliant Business Moves!
Following the acquisition of M-Audio by Avid, the Digidesign division soon announced that they were releasing a Pro Tools M-Powered version of their Pro Tools LE software that previously could only be used with the proprietary M-Box or 001 or 002 products. This was a shrewd and brilliant move by Avid, Digidesign and the newly acquired M-Audio. Its no secret that Digi’s Pro Tools is noted as the industry standard and the platform of choice by a vast majority of digital recording studios. It even has its own white paper written by a think-tank of the finest recording minds and Pro Tools users in the industry, spelling out the standards for delivery of final Pro Tools files. From a marketing standpoint, getting somebody interested in recording to learn your software in the beginning all but insures they will follow on to the higher-end of your product offerings if they progress beyond recording in the bedroom, garage or den and decide they need to “full blown” Pro Tools rig. This is a tried and true marketing strategy. Ask anyone who had an Epiphone Les Paul who kept playing and then graduated to the Gibson Les Paul.

M-Audio Fan I Am
M-Audio is a company that made its mark developing and distributing innovative, quality, affordable hardware and software products for musicians. They define the term “Prosumer” with products that frankly performed exceptionally well with a great price-point, and have had a sterling reputation for writing great drivers for Mac and Windows-based hardware, from audio I/O products to MIDI devices. I’ve owned many M-Audio products. In fact, just before my partners and I sold ArtistPro Publishing to Thomson Learning, I bought a ton of stuff from a pre-Digidesign M-Audio that I’d been wanting to try out, including five B8 powered monitors and a sub-woofer, so I could put together a surround system in my home studio for use with Nuendo, plus a smaller surround system from them which I use in my living room with the plasma TV. I also bought the Tampa mic pre, which for the coins dropped is a very musical and inviting unit I use time and time again. I also stuffed my hard drive with every Reason Refill pack they sold, plus Reason and Live 3. Yeah, I went a little nuts. Damn, that was fun!

The other thing I had to own was the Ozone (and the matching backpack!). I had the chance to mess around with the Ozone when my company published several DVD titles on using software like Cubase, Pro Tools LE (where it was then only able to be used as a MIDI keyboard), Reason, and others. I was impressed with its size, it functionality, the stability of the drivers and the sheer portability of combining a PowerBook with a two-octive keyboard that came with phantom power, XLR and 1/4” inputs and a beefy headphone output, too. M-Audio loaned the units to us for production and we used them for each title.

Pro Tools, Temptation and Me
I moved to Shasta County, California in 2004 to finish raising my kids in a more sane environment than I was getting in the San Francisco bay area school systems. I bought a great house with a wonderful, huge room just waiting to be used for a recording studio after a few minor (MAJOR!) adjustments. My realtor’s son and I became good friends and he was needing a roomy, dedicated space to put his home studio rig, so I let him bring it into mine. He wanted access to all the toys I’ve compulsively accumulated over the years for recording and playing music, and I wanted to get a chance to add his Avalon SP737 to the rack and get a hands-on look at Pro Tools through messing with his 002, which was patched into my system.

Thus began an interesting experience for me and it was generating a feeling of Deja’Vu, all over again. When Apple release OS X, I found myself with an almost obsessive tendency to want to stand around any Mac running it and click, click, click. There was no doubt that the beauty of this previously NeXT OS in its final commercial stage was the real deal. Well thought out, Open Source kernels, easy to look at, and the hardware that ran it was beginning to really get up to par with the then current offerings from the Intel and AMD set, no virus or spyware problems, etc. It wasn’t long before I wanted one, craved one, and when we closed down the ArtistPro Magazine publication, I inherited a G5 Dual 2Ghz running OS X with 8GB of RAM. It went straight into my recording setup and the transition caused havoc and a completely artless creation period of time while I re-situated my workflow. I soon bought a matching 23” cinema display and my OS X fate was sealed. I finally had a system that was more than ready to crank with Pro Tools, but found myself in the same old thinking of “I don’t want to be stuck with one company” even though I’d thrown myself completely into the Apple-world, which is exactly that.

Change is Gonna Do You Good
Fast forward to the arrival of Pro Tools 002 in my recording studio. When my friend comes over to use the facility for his projects, what am I doing? Making the same looks and glances at that screen I used to give OS X before I “switched” and getting the same kind of intuitive feeling that I was looking at my unavoidable fate once again.

But wait, I already have a Tascam US-2400 control surface, a MOTU 828 MKII and a MOTU 2408 system, so I wasn’t ready to throw that out and run get on the Pro Tools bandwagon yet. While the 002 was in my studio and the software on my G5, it wasn’t “mine” even though I was welcome to work on it. It was easier for me to just keep being productive on what I already knew. Besides, the switch from Windows to Mac followed by porting dozens of multitrack songs into new DAW was daunting enough! Again, I resisted working in Pro Tools. Plus at the time, the M-Powered version first announced wasn’t “Tiger compatible at the time it nor did it work with my only remaining M-Audio I/O device, which was the Ozone. Then last summer M-Audio announced that the M-Powered Pro Tools was being released for OS X Tiger. Now I was finally out of excuses. Then they announced the next wave of M-Audio hardware compatible with M-Powered Pro Tools included drivers for the Ozone, too. No more excuses, no big investment in hardware, as I already owned it and liked it. Cool.

Taking the Test Drive
I installed Pro Tools M-Powered 7.0 on my PowerBook G4 1.25 Ghz, which was running 2GB of RAM and a 5400 RPM, 80GB drive. I fooled around with it and was up to speed pretty quickly. The software arrived in the midst of the holidays and the new year, so getting to work with it right away was left to mean getting it installed, learning my way around by following the tutorials I’d published (but never studied and applied!), then readying myself for the slow train coming to take me to NAMM by gathering multitrack recording projects from my G5 system and getting the audio into the PowerBook. Fortunately. anyone making a transition from another DAW software application is likely to be able to get right to work in Pro Tools M-Powered.

Before long I was packed and ready to roll. When 2AM came around on the day I left for NAMM, the train was already late, and arrived instead about 5AM. I got onboard, got the attendant to lug my backpack and bag to the room, ate some breakfast and went straight to sleep. I awoke about noon, somewhere in-between Sacramento and Oakland. After a cup of coffee (Note to self: Amtrak coffee is terrible), I set up the “studio” in my little sleeper room. I had crammed a power strip, my PowerBook, the M-Audio Ozone with its power supply and USB cable, a USB hub, a few various types of cables, a tuner and some other things I thought I might need like a Rockman to get a little “tone” out of when I laid down my tracks while riding on the tracks at the same time. I brought along a Les Paul Special, the double cutaway version with tasty P-90’s. I had the whole thing hooked up in about ten minutes, tuned up and called open a session file I had previously loaded when prepping for the trip.

Pro Tools M-Powered opened nicely on my G4 1.25. I was impressed with its speed in loading a 3.5 minute, 16-track session and its handling via Re-Wire the other tracks put down in Reason. Even with the slower 5400 RPM drive, the load time was quite tolerable. I did have to set my buffer up to 1024 in order to run that many tracks and a few of the plug-ins from the Producer Factory bundle in order to compensate for the drive speed, etc, but I didn’t have any latency issues that were terribly bothersome as a result while monitoring through the phones with the Ozone. All this said, I “dumbed down” the resolution of the tracks I had originally recorded using the MOTU and Digital Performer from 24/96 to 16/44.1 in order to give the PowerBook a fighting chance and myself the possibility of recording guitar parts without technical headaches. Besides, I was recording directly into the PowerBook with the Ozone, using a Rockman and couple of jerry-rigged adapters to get out of the headphone out from it back into the Ozone.

Getting around in Pro Tools 7 M-Powered is a breeze. Digidesign has produced a very intuitive interface. I armed tracks, hit the record button on the “transport” and got busy. I got some great looks from passengers walking through the car and a lot of questions from Amtrak workers who made their way through. I guess they have not had a lot of guys trying to record on the train before! There was nothing but fun in front of me for a couple of hours as I tried to capture take after take while the train car shook from side to side to side to side to side. It was like being in a cradle. In a previous life in Nashville I had tried recording in a tour bus on a four track cassette recorder. It was a little shaky as well, but nothing compared to trying to do this on a train.

The hazards of sleeper-car studio recording include:
*An uneasy finger on the track pad, making for prolonged opening of menus, choosing tools, tracks, arming them, etc. because of the constant jostling of the train

*Very cramped quarters, so don’t try this unless you’re traveling alone

*Falling into a catatonic trance from the constant swaying, leading you to suddenly wake up whilst sitting up with the guitar in your hand and realizing the track was over 15 minutes ago but you were still recording

OK, so maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all, but it did make any interesting experience and an interesting angle for a story. So, back to the gear......

The rest of the story had to be written when I returned from NAMM, the then upcoming Grammy Awards, and a couple of other little side trips here and there. I did promise M-Audio the story would come out a little earlier, but it wasn’t meant to be for a couple of reasons. It wasn’t all my laziness, there was a good deal of technical misfortune involved that slowed me down.

Death of a PowerBook
My trusty PowerBook suffered its fourth drive and heat disaster in February shortly after coming home from LA for the Grammy Awards events. Having been repaired three times previously, the amazing customer care folks at Apple offered me a shiny new MacBook Pro with some awesome free upgrades like a 2Ghz Core Duo processor, and even a faster 7200 RPM hard drive. Listen up folks, always and I mean always buy the AppleCare Protection Plan with any Mac purchase. It’s the best service in the computer world.

This PowerBook death threw a wrinkle into some things for me. First, I was without my PowerBook or any notebook computer for a month. That was worse than quitting smoking! Fortunately I had regular data backups and didn’t lose the story notes, but I didn’t have a machine to run Pro Tools M-Power on so I could finish the project. The hold up was that you could not run Pro Tools M-Powered on the same machine you had a Pro Tools LE installation on (if the versions were mismatched, with the lower version of LE like 6.xx). Trust me folks, you really, truly cannot do this. Not even with different user accounts you cannot do this. I’d like to tell you how I know this, but I might start crying again. Digidesign’s way-smarter-than-me-about-this-stuff folks warned me, but I didn’t listen.

Shortly after that little trick, I was saved by the announcement of version 7.1, in which both the LE version and the M-Powered version supported the new Music Production Toolkit software expansion option, which would now allow co-installation of both Pro Tools LE and Pro Tools M-Powered software on the same computer (as well as support Apple Power Mac G5 Quad processor computers).

From the Digidesign Website: Registered Pro Tools LE 7 owners and registered Pro Tools M-Powered owners (any software version) can download the updates for free. Installation discs are also available from the online DigiStore for a small handling fee. You will also receive the updates if you purchase either the Music Production Toolkit or DV Toolkit 2.
**Important Compatibility Note: Installation of Pro Tools LE 7.1 software will disable operation of the original DV Toolkit software option. If you intend to use Pro Tools LE 7.1 (or a future version of Pro Tools LE software) with DV Toolkit, you will need to upgrade to DV Toolkit 2.

Luckily I was about to attend a NARAS event down in San Francisco, which hosted a silent auction to support the work of Musicares. At the auction they had, and I bought, two shiny new M-Box2’s from Digidesign. Each came with Pro Tools LE v7, which after the .1 release saved my arse with my bungled install of Pro Tools M-Powered on top of Pro Tools 6.xx. Just like that, the mess I’d made of my friend’s Pro Tools installation was resolved, he was happy to see the new version on the machine and unless he reads this article, he’ll never know how hard I panicked in the weeks before! Now I was back to work with my tracks, able to keep trying the M-Powered version of Pro Tools along with the Ozone, so I could finish this story and hopefully enjoy the forgiveness of the folks I promised it to earlier. The curse of the home studio owner is that he rarely will consider anything “finished” and keep tweaking it. Pro Tools M-Powered makes this curse worse, because you have so many editing options that only when you force yourself to say “This time for real, it’s finished!” will you likely do so.

Plays More Nicely with Others Now
Well, it plays nice with its own new family members, anyway. Pro Tools M-Powered ships with over thirty DigiRack™ and Bomb Factory™ plug-ins, including EQ, dynamics, delay, reverb, among others. The best part about it is it give you a lot of what I didn't like about the "Pro Tools commitment" before, which was a variety of choices in I/O for your computer, both for Windows and Mac. Since M-Audio's FireWire devices are all bus-powered, as is the M-Box2 (via USB), you can choose hardware with all kinds of great options, from simple audio interfaces to the new and way-cool Ozonic keyboards, the FireWire big-brother of the original Ozone. Any, since the M-Audio hardware also lets you run other types of audio programs, you can finally have a Pro Tools and a lot of choices, which is certain to attract a lot of new users to this platform.

MacIntel and M-Powered, No So Good Right Now
While the Intel-compatible version of Pro Tools LE, HD, M-Powered, etc. is being readied for release as we speak, as of this writing it is not compatible. I wanted to see what would happen if you tried to use it on the MacBook Pro. Two words: Kernel Panic! No harm done, but you do get to see that lovely multi-language descending gray screen of death (the one Ellen Fleiss didn’t warn you about) if you simply try to launch the program.

Why People Will Buy It and Why They Will Use It
There is an initial branding allure of using Pro Tools to the entry-level recordist because the professional studios of the world are using the same brand of software and hardware. That is reason enough that I think a whole new world of people are going to be more tempted to try Pro Tools M-Powered first now rather than other DAW applications. I think the pro-level compatibility, the bragging rights of saying you use Pro Tools, the choices of hardware now available from M-Audio that provide further compatibility, the combined low price-point for entry into a Pro Tools system using M-Powered software and M-Audio I/O cards, all of these things work together to remove the previous barriers that new or even long-time consumers of professional audio equipment like me would have had to sway their decisions with previously. Pro Tools M-Powered lets owners of M-Audio I/O devices harness the power of the application and 32 tracks of audio at up to 24/96 sample rates with non-destructive editing plus 256 tracks of MIDI recording. That’s really the only disadvantage of the program, its 32 track limitation. With that said, I’d venture that the typical buyer of the M-Powered software is likely to rarely need more than 32 audio tracks for their projects, especially alongside 256 tracks of MIDI sequencing. Couple with that the Re-Wire ability of Pro Tools M-Powered and you could end up with all the tracks you would likely ever use in a project or home studio environment.

People will buy this because it’s Pro Tools-branded, compatible, custom configurable with M-Audio cards, finally very affordable, has an excellent reputation, it works with various control surfaces, it is the industry-standard brand, reliable, comes with features like great plug-ins (EQ, dynamics, delay, reverb, etc), the files are fully transportable across other levels of Pro Tools systems, plus cross-platform versions of Pro Tools. They’ll buy it and use it for all of these reasons, but they’ll stick with for two main reasons; it’s easy to learn to use and it just plain sounds great. Five stars for Pro Tools M-Powered. It is definitely Rated Excellent by AppleProAudio.com.


MSRP $299.99 (Street Price: $249.99)
System Requirements**
*A compatible M-Audio peripheral
*A Digidesign-qualified computer running Mac OS X
*Supported M-Audio Peripherals: Audiophile USB, Fast Track Pro, JamLab, ProjectMix I/O, Black Box, Ozone, MobilePre USB, Fast Track USB, Transit, FireWire 1814, FireWire 410, FireWire Solo, FireWire Audiophile, Ozonic, Audiophile 2496, Audiophile 192, Delta 1010, Delta 1010LT, Delta 66, Delta 44

Pro Tools M-Powered software requires a supported M-Audio hardware peripheral to function. A PACE iLok USB Smart Key is required for Pro Tools M-Powered, many optional Digidesign and Digidesign Development Partner plug-ins. Visit www.digidesign.com or www.m-audio.com for more information.