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Old 02-26-2014, 09:06 AM   #1
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Default NASDAQ Suspends Trading Of Avid, Maker Of Sibelius & Pro Tools

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/20...ius-pro-tools/
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Old 02-26-2014, 09:44 AM   #2
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We all knew it was coming ... especially after the last round of reports from Avid saying "All our previous financial data is flawed, and um ... the dog ate our homework as well"

No one is surprised that this didnt satisfy the NASDAQ.
I'm stunned they got as much leniency as they did.


Its sad really ... gross mismanagement of a digital audio pioneer.
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Old 02-26-2014, 10:38 AM   #3
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Does this mean they aren't the "industry standard" any more?
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Old 02-26-2014, 03:30 PM   #4
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Originally Posted by jerome_oneil View Post
Does this mean they aren't the "industry standard" any more?
Sarcasm, is that you?

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Old 02-26-2014, 03:37 PM   #5
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I wonder how much pro tools 6 on an iMac g5 connected to an
original mbox will be worth? I thought about
selling it but might be collectible one day.
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Old 02-27-2014, 08:37 AM   #6
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There are a couple of threads on this at the DUC and in the Moan Zone at GS.
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Old 02-27-2014, 03:42 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The Byre View Post
There are a couple of threads on this at the DUC and in the Moan Zone at GS.
I've been following the thread on GS since its inception, but i just caught up on the last couple of weeks ....

Recommended reading, to say the least.

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/moan-...gation-26.html



A statement was made on the last few pages (post #762), that REAPER has 12% of the DAW worldwide user base, whilst PT has only 11% (Cubase is King at 22%, whilst Logic is 2nd at 15%).
No source was provided for this, and a few other users respectfully disputed it, but i'm gonna shout it anyway ....


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REAPER Slayeth The Dragon !!!
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Old 02-27-2014, 04:19 PM   #8
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That is a seriously silly claim, simply because it is non quantifiable, these companies sales figures are not all shared publicly, and if we go simply by web traffic/downloads then FLS would hold something in the region of 50-60% of the market hahahaha

Also this whole idea that this issue over at Avid has anything to do with sales or performance is quite literally laughable, it is more likely that so much money was being made that somebody decided they could skim some here and there and nobody would notice, and even that is much less likely than the accountant simply making stupid mistakes with rule changes.

This is being blown out of proportion right now (Be clear here, I am not saying they have financial or sales issues or not either way)
Things have to play out before anything can be said about the situation.
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Old 02-28-2014, 11:17 AM   #9
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Shocking!


We all knew this was coming. The curious thing is that it sort of parallels the U.S., people won't even discuss a world without PT. As if it has some magical power to sustain itself with no innovation and a crazy price tag.

I suggest Avid consider licensing the PT project file format, it's their last card. There are still some digital cork sniffers apparently, but people coming up are not going to have such a belief.


Otherwise, if Justin & co. just stay the course....
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Old 02-28-2014, 11:47 AM   #10
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Otherwise, if Justin & co. just stay the course....
Lol. Unless Justin and Co, start making large media servers and all of the other media software and things that AVID's deepest pocket customer base needs, not really.

We cannot (can we?) really be that clueless. Yeah, Cocoks just barely missed getting that Olympic contract with NBC ...

http://www.avid.com/US/press-room/NB...-Olympic-Games

Ninjam just wasn't quite ready yet.

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Old 02-28-2014, 12:20 PM   #11
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Lol. Unless Justin and Co, start making large media servers and all of the other media software and things that AVID's deepest pocket customer base needs, not really.
Quite right L!
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Old 02-28-2014, 01:47 PM   #12
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I think you can say a few things for certain.

1. Avid has many popular products, many of which dominate their industry niches.

2. They have been losing money for a while, and the loss rate has been accelerating.

3. They misstated their income for many years, which caused them to have to revise prior financial statements, and led to being delisted by NASDAQ. Specifically, they booked revenue up front for software sales even when they knew they would have to do ongoing work to support those software contracts.

4. Regardless of the cause of their accounting errors, the money is the money; they took in a lot of revenue, and spent more than they took in.


So there is a disconnect between the success of their products, and the health of their company. On the surface, it appears that they spend more money supporting their products than they make from the products, but "supporting" can mean many things, including advertising, executive pay, etc.

Their products are so embedded within their niche that it's hard to imagine them simply going away. However, they cannot continue on their current path, because you can't lose money every year and stay in business.

I watched their investor relations video and they certainly seem to understand the magnitude of the problem. Some of their ideas for transforming their business seemed sensible, and other ideas less so. It's tempting to think that some of the problem is executive costs and overhead, and there was no suggestion of any change in that area.

Whether they are able to fix their business successfully, only time will tell. Either way, it doesn't have much (or any) bearing on Cockos, any more than what happens at Chrysler affects Harley-Davidson.

.

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Old 02-28-2014, 02:28 PM   #13
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Quote:
Originally Posted by schwa View Post
..it doesn't have much (or any) bearing on Cockos, any more than what happens at Chrysler affects Harley-Davidson.
What a great way to put it.
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Old 02-28-2014, 02:34 PM   #14
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That is a seriously silly claim, simply because it is non quantifiable, these companies sales figures are not all shared publicly, and if we go simply by web traffic/downloads then FLS would hold something in the region of 50-60% of the market hahahaha

Also this whole idea that this issue over at Avid has anything to do with sales or performance is quite literally laughable, it is more likely that so much money was being made that somebody decided they could skim some here and there and nobody would notice, and even that is much less likely than the accountant simply making stupid mistakes with rule changes.

This is being blown out of proportion right now (Be clear here, I am not saying they have financial or sales issues or not either way)
Things have to play out before anything can be said about the situation.
I agree, and someone else in that thread said the same, or similar, about FL.

The only reason anyone took that data at "face value" was because of the high integrity of the poster (The Byre).


I disagree on the second point though ... i do think Avids sales are plunging/falling, but not just that ... A big theme in this, that keeps coming up, is that many high end pro users/facilities (the only ones that actually count, according to Avid, now that M-Audio is no longer theirs and they have no prosumer market left) were more than happy with PT 7.4 or PT 9 ... Avid basically had no choice but to "give them an offer they couldn't refuse" to "force" them to upgrade, and the costs involved in this blew out expotentially.

So we could say their pro market sales are chugging along nicely, but at what cost?
A sale that costs money to the seller is not a sale at all.
Sure, there are now Avid rigs all over the professional market, that will need upgrading in the future ... but it hammered Avid so badly that they may not be there to recoup this "investment"



It's like watching a car crash ... i cant turn my eyes away, despite my better judgement
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Old 02-28-2014, 04:26 PM   #15
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Avid's Pro Tools is the industry standard. Only, there isn't much of an industry left, at least not in the traditional sense. You can have the very best solution money can buy to track a full symphony orchestra at 96/24 and 5ms latency, but there isn't enough clients who need to do that to keep you in business. Today's industry is the composer in his loft, the producer in his project studio, the musician recording his band in the basement. It is people like me writing songs and collaborating with others around the world who email me their parts. The industry has changed and Avid didn't change fast enough with it.

Avid's pricing model is built on imposing artificial restrictions on entry-level products hoping to force customers into buying the overpriced flagship products. Most successful businesses have a model based on the exact opposite idea: offering value for the money.

Pro Tools 11 is actually a very nice and competitive DAW, although it's priced $200-300 too high. The problem is that it took so long for Avid to come up with a feature-competitive version that a lot of people had moved away to other solutions.
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Old 03-01-2014, 02:24 AM   #16
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lawrence View Post
Lol. Unless Justin and Co, start making large media servers and all of the other media software and things that AVID's deepest pocket customer base needs, not really.

We cannot (can we?) really be that clueless. Yeah, Cocoks just barely missed getting that Olympic contract with NBC ...

Quote:
Originally Posted by timlloyd View Post
Quite right L!

Pro Tools is not a business based on providing media servers. Avid is bleeding money, that has nothing to do with Pro Tools continuing in it's present form indefinitely.
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Old 03-01-2014, 06:55 AM   #17
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True - but the business niche that Avid is operating in is indeed working towards more server-based solutions. The important thing is how does PT fit into their overall product line? It is only one component of an overall production software line - and that line is serving a niche market that is increasingly looking to cut costs more & more.

Nothing is forever. As Avid is offered more serious competition in their core areas (by Adobe, for instance), if they can't keep up then they will end up marginalized (or even out of business) despite peoples' belief that they are "industry standard".
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Old 03-01-2014, 12:13 PM   #18
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hahahaha.... I see it as a great opportunity for Cockos to buy AVID and fix it!

ummmm ...ReaTooled? The new industry standard
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Old 03-01-2014, 12:18 PM   #19
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hahahaha.... I see it as a great opportunity for Cockos to buy AVID and fix it!

ummmm ...ReaTooled? The new industry standard
+1

I was thinking the exact same!
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Old 03-01-2014, 01:59 PM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by pattste

Pro Tools 11 is actually a very nice and competitive DAW, although it's priced $200-300 too high. The problem is that it took so long for Avid to come up with a feature-competitive version that a lot of people had moved away to other solutions.
This is a fallacy that's well cultivated.

The product that has features for efficient and smart use of resources, i.e. your time and the computers features, costs around $5000 if you buy it new. You purchase a hardware+software bundle because that's one of two ways to buy Protools HD. The other is the convoluted PT10+CPTK upgrade to HD option for $1000.

RAM cache, competitive automation recording features(hey Cockos!!) that are only really usable if you buy an Icon or System 5/6 controller, multiple video tracks, offline rendering of more than one stereo mix(Cockos and Nuendo are king in this), surround mixing, and automation EDITING features, which previously occupied an inbetween-LE-and-HD niche.

Good product if you have a business that can support it. Hate the strategy concerning software features because it's really bad for my bottom line and seems artificial.

I do not want them to fail. But I sure would like for Protools to change and become more competitive, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to happen the way I'd like it to.

You think PT12 will have redefinable shortcut keys like it's 1999 ? I'll believe it when I see it.
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Old 03-01-2014, 03:18 PM   #21
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This is a fallacy that's well cultivated.
What fallacy? It wasn't until version 11 that Pro Tools went 64-bit and got offline bounce, for instance. Most other DAWs have had those features for years. Unless you're saying that it still doesn't have competitive features, although I don't see many sharing that opinion.
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Old 03-01-2014, 03:28 PM   #22
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When you consider Pro Tools' capabilities in comparison to other DAWs on the market, it has always been over-priced. While its marketing has primarily been to "high-end" and "pro" facilities, it never changed that fact (IMO). The only reason it was for so long the "industry standard" was simply because it was the one of the first and it offered software/hardware proprietary systems (unlike other early DAWs such as Cakewalk's first releases - eg. Pro Audio). That in no way made/makes it superior to any other, just more "elite". I have always preferred other DAWs to Pro Tools, even since the earlier years of software-based recording. Having used all major (and some not-so...) DAWs over the years in one form/situation or another, I find REAPER to be the most stable and user-friendly, still. The customization, compatability and workflow just isn't matched anywhere else in the industry. AVID has pushed so hard to make their products proprietary and incompatible with other like products, that it was really just a matter of time before they damaged their standing in the industry. Forcing companies that made VST and VSTi products to be compatible with their way of use...just a bad idea, I think. And they waited far too long to become "native friendly"...too little, too late. And, I have found Pro Tools far too temperamental and unstable over the years to be usable over long periods of time. I can't say I would be sorry to see it go...just saying.
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Old 03-04-2014, 06:36 AM   #23
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You think PT12 will have redefinable shortcut keys like it's 1999 ? I'll believe it when I see it.
You can't change the shortcut keys in PT?
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Old 03-04-2014, 07:37 AM   #24
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You can't change the shortcut keys in PT?
Nope, you never could. I think they did that because of familiarity - any PT operator can work in any facility which runs PT anywhere in the world, and have exactly the same keyboard layout without loading configuration files etc.
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Old 03-04-2014, 12:33 PM   #25
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Originally Posted by schwa View Post
I think you can say a few things for certain.

1. Avid has many popular products, many of which dominate their industry niches.

2. They have been losing money for a while, and the loss rate has been accelerating.

3. They misstated their income for many years, which caused them to have to revise prior financial statements, and led to being delisted by NASDAQ. Specifically, they booked revenue up front for software sales even when they knew they would have to do ongoing work to support those software contracts.

4. Regardless of the cause of their accounting errors, the money is the money; they took in a lot of revenue, and spent more than they took in.


So there is a disconnect between the success of their products, and the health of their company. On the surface, it appears that they spend more money supporting their products than they make from the products, but "supporting" can mean many things, including advertising, executive pay, etc.

Their products are so embedded within their niche that it's hard to imagine them simply going away. However, they cannot continue on their current path, because you can't lose money every year and stay in business.

I watched their investor relations video and they certainly seem to understand the magnitude of the problem. Some of their ideas for transforming their business seemed sensible, and other ideas less so. It's tempting to think that some of the problem is executive costs and overhead, and there was no suggestion of any change in that area.

Whether they are able to fix their business successfully, only time will tell. Either way, it doesn't have much (or any) bearing on Cockos, any more than what happens at Chrysler affects Harley-Davidson.

.
Where's that darn "Like" button again?

Quoted for truthiness...

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Old 03-04-2014, 02:32 PM   #26
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If they do collapse, all the VST vendors that invested effort and capital into developing to the AAX standard will not be happy, and then will be looking to recoup the costs.
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Old 03-04-2014, 04:09 PM   #27
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Where's that darn "Like" button again?

Quoted for truthiness...

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Old 03-04-2014, 04:15 PM   #28
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If they do collapse, all the VST vendors that invested effort and capital into developing to the AAX standard will not be happy, and then will be looking to recoup the costs.
Recoup them from who? Can't get blood from a rock.
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Old 03-04-2014, 05:06 PM   #29
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What fallacy? It wasn't until version 11 that Pro Tools went 64-bit and got offline bounce, for instance. Most other DAWs have had those features for years. Unless you're saying that it still doesn't have competitive features, although I don't see many sharing that opinion.
That's not what I meant. I meant that the small $600 version, which is the price of buying it new, is the castrated, less efficient version. Artificial barriers made for the current clients, so there's really no danger to anyone else as hardly anyone will want less features, flexiblity and selection of free as well as non-free plugins, like they do with any VST host. Logic is a gigantically better deal than Protools for folks on OSX too.

It's more of a waste of time discussing Protools as a threat. It's a decent source of some good ideas, and something to point at when we discuss bad ones and say "Please don't do that".
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Old 03-04-2014, 05:29 PM   #30
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Nope, you never could. I think they did that because of familiarity - any PT operator can work in any facility which runs PT anywhere in the world, and have exactly the same keyboard layout without loading configuration files etc.
Yeah, but they could use the defaults anyhow - I thought that was SOP. Oh well.
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Old 03-04-2014, 08:16 PM   #31
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To me pro tools is like snap on tools. They are expensive, shiny and have a long standing reputation amongst the industry. In the end some people come to the realization that a craftsman socket set works just as good, if not better than snap on for a quarter of the cost.

In the end they are both tools and we're all sort of audio mechanics.
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Old 03-04-2014, 09:41 PM   #32
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A lot of people misunderstand how and why ProTools became an industry standard, and a lot of arguments for and against it are unfair.

Cycle back to something like the mid-90s (I am going off of memory, and my dates may be off)... the technology to reliably deal with low-latency multi-track recording to computer hard disk is fairly new. We had been able to do "CD quality" recording to computer hard disk since the early 90's, but it was slow, one-track-at-a-time, and not really usable until roughly the Pentium 4 era...

Back in these dark ages of computer recording, reliable real-time mixing and monitoring were out of the question. It was possible to use the computer as a pure recording/playback device, but live "in the box" mixing and multitrack playback/rendering of high-quality audio was a pipe-dream, nevermind simultaneous real-time low-latency effects processing.

CPUs and data-busses were simply not able to handle much more than than acting as a simple multitrack recorder: you still had to do all your mixing on a separate (analog) mixing console, you had to do all your effects with outboard hardware boxes, etc. In short, computers were not much better than digital tape machines like ADAT, and were actually often quite worse, because they were less reliable and more finicky and difficult to operate...

Then along came ProTools. It was around version 3, I think, that it really became possible to replace a system of either reel-to-reel or ADAT 24-track with a computer, where ProTools used the Mac/PC as modern "DAW"-type editing/mixing interface, with outboard hardware to do the actual DSP of fader and EQ changes. This was revolutionary, and the beginning of the modern DAW era. It is important to understand that ProTools was a hybrid software/hardware system that used outboard computing hardware to handle the realtime mixing tasks, and the core "computer" was really nothing more than a digital tape-machine with a software interface for controlling the ProTools DSP that did all the mixing and DA/AD work.

These early systems sold for something like $20,000-ish, but were still WAY cheaper than high-end analog mixing consoles and tape-machines, with vastly better/faster/easier editing capabilities. And the time-saving was incredible.

It's important to understand that, at the time, if you wanted to fix the timing of a drum-hit, you had to do things like watch the tape-reel while listening to the track, mark the tape with a grease-pencil or sharpie at the place where you heard it, and at the place where you wanted it to hit, remove the tape-reel, physically cut the tape with a razor, tape it back together with scotch-tape, reel it back up, then play it back and see if it sounded right, and then re-record it to a new tape not held together with scotch-tape edits, etc...

Ptotools saved a ton of very expensive and high-skill labor and trial-and-error by allowing the kind of real-time mouse-click editing that we now take for granted. And it achieved it by using outboard DSP hardware, using the computer as basically a control-panel.

It was really only about 10 years ago or so that it became realistic to record muti-track entirely native, and competing DAWs like Sonar, Cubase, and Logic emerged from the realm of MIDI sequencers, offering ProTools-like functionality in a software package. But they were finicky, glitchy, and prone to dropout/latency problems. Meanwhile, ProTools came out with their "TDM" boxes, which not only offered rock-solid reliability and track-count, but also low-latency outboard effects processing.

It was around this time that serious, credible producers and engineers started making records mostly or entirely "in the box", and for a time, ProTools was still the only reliable way to do that. But as computing power increased, there was less and less need for outboard DSP, and purely "native" recording/production became first possible, then realistic, then commonplace...

ProTools itself was finally forced to "go native", once computers became powerful enough that outboard DSP became silly. At that point, ProTools lost any kind of pure technical advantage for mainstream recording, and turned into "just another DAW" for most purposes.

PT still has legacy advantages in terms of file-format, familiarity, brand-cache, "industry-standard-ness", etc. And it also retains some technical advantages in terms of post-production feature-set, etc.

But once upon a time, and not very long ago, it was genuinely a category unto itself, if you needed reliable real-time track-counts in a computer-based recording system.
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Old 03-05-2014, 07:09 AM   #33
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The only reason anyone took that data at "face value" was because of the high integrity of the poster (The Byre).
That'll be me then!

Those figures caused a bit of a stir, because

1. Most people just saw the headline figures and assumed that it was something other than just what I stated 'user base' - i.e. NOT downloads, sales, installations, pro-users or any other metric. The question was "The DAW I use the most is . . ." and the answer was open-ended, i.e. no multiple choice.

2. I did not give a source. I could not and I cannot still, as it is based on private information. If however you look at all the various on-line surveys and also just talk to many users, amateur, professional or 'prosumer' you see almost exactly the same or very similar figures.

Reaper has two main types of user - full professionals who have access to anything and already have PT and other DAWs, but prefer Reaper - and complete amateurs who just like to muck about with audio SW and for whom, Reaper is the cheapest fully-featured DAW.

From Bjork to the BBC, Reaper is just what the full-pro needs. It is stable, works on a bog-standard (cheap) PC, very configure-able and so cheap that one can install ten workplaces in an editing suite without having to invest huge sums or get special permission from someone who hasn't the foggiest notion of what audio even is. Most importantly, it does it ALL. Autotune, harmonies, bar-beat editing, time-stretching, MIDI editing, quantising - all those tools are INCLUDED. No need for expensive Waves or iZotope plugs, with the exception of noise tools, Reaper comes with everything you need.

ProTools on the other hand, comes with most things, but not everything. You still need to spend more money on key plugs and it is also torn between amateur users and fully professional users.

In the past, with the minor exceptions of things like Soundscape, PT was the ONLY game in town and it was really the only SW that could do it all. With the advent of DSP boxes and ever-faster computers, many pro users, especially musicians and producers with home studios, just do not see the need for HD.

In the beginning of HD, the only reason people went for it, was for the track-count. If you want to do a drop-in for an entire orchestra across 48 tracks, you need lots and lots of tracks. And of course, you needed low latency of below 2ms. All the other features like surround (5.1 and 7.1) were just not an issue at the time, as mixing was seldom ITB.

As for the future of Avid, we shall all just have to wait to see what Hernandez does with the company and what sort of (nasty?) surprises come out when those books are finally submitted. He is a capable man and could pull the ship around. If Avid starts making profits, then he might just be able to sell it. If not, then it fails and the IP bits get picked up by the likes of Corel, Autodesk, In-Music or The Music Group.

In the short term, he could do it. In the long term, I doubt Avid has a real future.

Avid is a company that had a brilliant strategy for growth, but none for profit. Instead of shoring up the finances, it went on mad-cap buying sprees for M-Audio, Euphonix, SoftImage and Pinnacle and other bits and pieces that just didn't fit and that it bought FAR too high and had to sell for pennies. It also managed to drive loyal mid-market customers (i.e. small to medium post houses, small studios, musicians and producers) into the arms of Apple (FCP and Logic) and Adobe (Premier & After-Effects). It did this with a strategy of milking the upgrade paths and using the 'snob-effect' of being the only true choice for the professional.

And then I saw one of the guys who had edited the score for Lord of the Rings (on his large HD rig, which he still has) using Logic and Reaper for his next project and knew that you can only take that kind of arrogance so far, before it turns and bites you!

The biggest problem for high-end professional Avid customers was not so much the initial cost (if you are building a $1m studio, who cares if the multitrack costs $3k or $30k!) but the constant drip-drip-drip cost and annoyance of upgrades and the totally confusing range of options. That meant you had to go to a systems reseller and most of these were pretty ropey! But if you wanted to be able to edit on the fly and use effects without latency problems and in video, render big projects without having wait a couple of weeks, Avid was the only game in town. So despite all the drawbacks, PT and MC became a sort of standard.

Today, all that has changed and will change even more. The next generation of PCs will have on-board DSP and DVP, the next generation of ADDA boxes will be so cheap and good (think $500 for a 96kHz, 24-IO rack-mount) that nobody in their right minds will bother spending the extra for the snob-effect of having the 'industry standard.'

In an age where a cheap PC can edit a 4K film and your wi-fi can chuck terabytes of stuff around, Avid is going to probably retreat into a very small niche of big film and TV installations. If it does that, it may make itself profitable for a while, but that niche will get smaller and smaller . . .

Either that, or it has to go head-to-head with CuBase, Reaper and Logic and about 20 different video and film editing packages.

Remember that the small bedroom-user of today is the same guy who will spec-up an entire TV station tomorrow. That's how Avid was able to replace Sony in the first place! Back in the 90s, Sony laughed at Avid and Avid's customers and laughed at the idea of digital tape (for video and audio) being replaced by hard-disks. I was there when Avid launched the tapeless 'CamCutter' at News-World in Berlin and Sony described it as a 'stupid idea!'
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Old 03-05-2014, 07:36 AM   #34
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using the 'snob-effect' of being the only true choice for the professional
It may be telling that one of Avid's strategies for creating profit, as described in their investor relations video, is "creating raving fans" (the CEO's words) who will advocate for Avid products within their market categories. This was presented high on the list of bullet points. Clearly they consider what you call the "snob effect" as a company asset, which they will continue to try to monetize.
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Old 03-05-2014, 07:59 AM   #35
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Remember that the small bedroom-user of today is the same guy who will spec-up an entire TV station tomorrow. That's how Avid was able to replace Sony in the first place! Back in the 90s, Sony laughed at Avid and Avid's customers and laughed at the idea of digital tape (for video and audio) being replaced by hard-disks. I was there when Avid launched the tapeless 'CamCutter' at News-World in Berlin and Sony described it as a 'stupid idea!'
I had a similar experience at the Digiworld event in 2001(or 2000, not sure) in Berlin. Charles Dye was doing presentations on how he mixed a Ricky Martin song in the box. Everyone was reluctant to do anything in the box that way, as all you basically had back then were Waves and Focusrite plugins for the TDM systems. The reports of Charles probably jump started a lot of folks in to trying to go more in-the-box. It certainly did for the post folks I was working for.

TV series in my area were just beginning to be mixed with Protools and it was all fresh and exciting. And cheaper. We went from an $120.000 Augan workstation to a $80.000 extravaganza Protools TDM system that was faster, easier to edit with, had easier to access I/O, required no extra mixing board like we'd used before and in the end just kicked the previous generation of equipment out on to the curb. No more BetaSP tape, though the scrubbing was miles better on the Augan (and Reapers still slides around and needs improvements in mouse-to-movement curves).


Now I don't need Protools any longer, except when it's necessary for compatiblities sake.

Reaper and Nuendo(I'm a post guy so those are my options) are configurable to a much higher degree. They offer easier installation, maintanance and backup of settings and accomodate more addon control options.

It's really just the highend mixing that Protools is a more reasonable option for these days, and even there Nuendo is on par in many ways, but not all.

I made the transition from custom workstations like the Augan and Fairlights to Protools just 13 years ago. Wow. And here we are again.


Btw, a lot of Protools users augment their setup with Reaper, or at least have been in last two years. So the question will be, when does Protools stop becoming the only option for specific tasks.

How many tasks are exclusive for any DAW to claim ?

But then, who likes or needs to change their backend, which goes for upgrade-wary users of Protools. Regressing to a previous Reaper version takes a minute or two. It takes hours for Protools users and even then they usually undertake collosal efforts to protect their running system, compared to Reaper or even Nuendo users.
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Old 03-05-2014, 08:50 AM   #36
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TV series in my area were just beginning to be mixed with Protools and it was all fresh and exciting. And cheaper.
Some time at the end of the 90s, I did some work at Pro7 in Munich and the post-prod sound was all done on a very sexy Fairlight (which had me completely baffled BTW) and soon afterwards I was at RTL in Cologne when they were still on the Aachener Strasse and Helmut Thoma threw a lavish party (yet again - those were the days!) to welcome the installation of the new switching room. I asked to see the audio department and I was lead past several Quantel posts to what looked like a broom cupboard with windows and there were two guys running small PT rigs!

It seems to me that Avid have completely forgotten where they came from and how they got there.
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Old 03-05-2014, 09:15 AM   #37
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It may be telling that one of Avid's strategies for creating profit, as described in their investor relations video, is "creating raving fans" (the CEO's words) who will advocate for Avid products within their market categories. This was presented high on the list of bullet points. Clearly they consider what you call the "snob effect" as a company asset, which they will continue to try to monetize.
There is a management theory book called 'Fans, not Customers!' and I assume that he has read it! The idea is that people that use/buy your product become more than just customers, but fans in the way that Reaper/Apple/Photoshop users are often to be heard banging on about how great some new toy is!

It's that whole 'emotional proximity' thing that we hope ties customers to us!

It is similar, but not identical to the 'snob-effect' which seeks to impart a perception of quality as a result of a higher price. There certainly is no functional difference between Native PT and Reaper (other than that Reaper is unrestricted and comes with everything!) and if you load Reaper, or any other DAW SW into a DSP system, there is no functional difference to an HD system.

I get the feeling that Hernandez is trying to recreate that 'buzz' that used to exist around Avid and Digi-Design back in the mid-90s. The only problem is that Avid has badly blotted its copy-book and has driven too many customers away from it, so he is starting on the back-foot.
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Old 03-05-2014, 09:40 AM   #38
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It may be telling that one of Avid's strategies for creating profit, as described in their investor relations video, is "creating raving fans" (the CEO's words) who will advocate for Avid products within their market categories. This was presented high on the list of bullet points. Clearly they consider what you call the "snob effect" as a company asset, which they will continue to try to monetize.
I thought that bullet point was pretty interesting also but I viewed it being more in the corporate arena than the studio or smaller arenas.

What they seemed to be saying is... "Let give these corporations the kind of solutions they need and create raving fans of them." To have ABC corp rave about how much AVID solutions saved them to XYZ company. That's where their future big money is, not so much in what the media apps do but more in larger total solutions.

If you watched the presentation one thing he talked about was (for example) companies literally spending millions of dollars a year shuffling media files around. I think the "raving fans" has more to do with that kind of thing, maybe not so much with personal PT users but with the kind of total media solutions that you can only really get from a few places, like them and Apple.

Imo, AVID's biggest mistake was trying to also be a consumer company like Apple. Their bread and butter is more with the larger customers. It's no more being a snob than Mercedes or BMW, who (by their nature) try to mostly appeal to customers with bigger budgets.

The (I guess new?) idea to reduce their products to a "platform" is (imo) a good idea. He talked about how the apps will reduce in individual size but the common attributes will reside on a higher level overall platform structure. I think - for larger media companies - it's not so much any individual app but how it all works together.

If it turns out to be what I think it is, good idea.

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Old 03-05-2014, 09:47 AM   #39
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And now I see that those figures I stated on GS were from memory and were wrong!

They should have been -

CuBase 22%
Logic 18%
Reaper 13%
ProTools 11%
Ableton Live 10%
Studio One 8%

Once again, that's just user base and not sales, downloads, MI sales, ebay sales or anything else.

In-store MI sales for the EU have CuBase at about double PT, with Live at position three.

With the launch of Bitwig, this is becoming an absurdly crowded market!
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Old 03-05-2014, 09:51 AM   #40
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How (just asking) do you measure the corporate AVID (PT) user base?

I would imagine that almost every corporate entity using multiple installs of Media Composer also have PT installed and in use.
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