The Pro Tools family of software and appliances is familiar to anyone in the audio industry today. Since 1991, that is when Digidesign released the first version of the Pro Tools software and hardware complex, this platform for professional digital processing of sound information has undergone many transformations, while remaining practically uncontested in terms of the sum of parameters and capabilities, and has become the de facto standard in all areas of work with sound.
The main task of Pro Tools is to competently and consciously record what has already been invented and, preferably, rehearsed, then painstakingly and thoughtfully edit and, ultimately, clearly aware of each step, combine the material captured in multitrack form into a stereo track.
The program proved to be effective and reliable, which became the key to its long and successful stay in the music market. But reliability in itself cannot be such a determining factor as to make any system dominant in the market.
As it usually happens in life, at first the success of the system worked to popularize its name, and then the promoted name worked for the popularity of the system. Therefore, to further capture the market, when the development of the speed and power qualities of the central processing units of personal computers reached acceptable values ​​for processing streaming audio, «lightweight» versions of Pro Tools were released, and greatly reduced in capabilities.
These versions were supposed to be perfected by installing additional plugins by the user. The problem of signal processing latency during processing by plug-ins has been solved in Pro Tools for a long time by using additional system computing resources to compensate for the playback of the required track in advance. All Pro Tools plug-ins now share the same common AAX format. Previously, users had to buy plugins twice – for different formats, and some came out in RTAS only or TDM only. But does this software support VST3?
Installing plugins of this format on Pro Tools is possible, but only with the help of additional actions and tools. The installation process itself is rather complicated, so it is not possible to describe it here.
Since this plug-in format is not native to Pro Tools, there is no guarantee that they will work efficiently and, most importantly, reliably and consistently. Therefore, we can conclude that, firstly, Pro Tools was not originally designed to use plug-ins of this format., аnd secondly, you can still use them, but the installation path itself is rather complicated. And, thirdly, even after installing this tool, there is no guarantee of reliability in its operation.
