The Expanding World of Pro Tools

Although Steinberg have made up a lot of ground on Digidesign’s dominance of the pro audio world, many see Pro Tools as the standard platform for professional audio production. The high-end Pro Tools packages are still very expensive, but Digidesign have developed some offerings which are accessible to the less affluent end of the market…

A major breakthrough in Pro Tools accessibility was the introduction of Pro Tools M-Powered. This allowed people who bought particular M-Audio interfaces to use a specially modified version of the software. Prior to this, the only way to get your hands on Pro Tools was by buying a relatively expensive Digidesign interface. Now, you can get your hands on an M-Powered interface bundle for a few hundred quid.

About five years ago the Digi 002 and Digi 002 rack were released, and these shipped with Pro Tools LE – slightly less powerful than the full version. This year, the successors to this line were released, namely the Digi 003 and Digi 003 rack. The difference between the two is simple: the Digi 003 is a firewire audio interface and hardware controller, while the Digi 003 rack is a 2U rack-mountable firewire audio interface without the controller features.

An upside of this is that the price of the Digi 002 series may drop further over the next while, and it’s still a very capable beast. If you don’t need more connectivity than 8-in, 8-out (with 4x balanced XLR mic preamp inputs) then this could be a good entry point into the world of Pro Tools. At the moment you can pick one up new for 899 euro from thomann.de, and a lot less second hand.