Bad Drivers Make For More Crashes
Digidesign’s Pro Tools software is the most well established digital audio workstation system in the world, and for good reason. It’s reasonably reliable, remarkably easy to use, scalable, and when you include the M-Powered and LE versions, pretty cheap.
Of course, these advantages come at a price; if you want to use Pro Tools software, you must use Digidesign/Avid hardware, which can be annoying if you just want to open up a session on your laptop and you forgot your M-Box or whatever.
I can understand why Digidesign does this. Digidesign basically sells hardware, and it can justify the cost of the box because the software is so good. Heck, it’s exactly what Apple does. And also, Digidesign don’t have to waste loads of time beta-testing software on other boxes. Once you buy a Digidesign box, whatever it is, if you use Pro Tools on it, it will just keep working. Pretty much.
However, if like many people around the world, you want to have a solution that allows you to occasionaly use Pro Tools, and also use other 3rd party software on Pro Tools hardware, I cannot stress enough how difficult life could become for you. And the reason is simple; Digidesign write terrible drivers.
The Digi CoreAudio driver (the piece of software which alllows Digidesign hardware to work with non-Digidesign software) may be the single-most time wasting piece of software in my studio. One minute it works, the next it doesn’t. Trying to switch sync from internal to external is a guessing game. And you’re not guaranteed that the version of the driver which works with your non-Digi software will work with Pro Tools. I was once forced into buying an upgrade to Pro Tools because it was the only way I could get my hands on the driver which allowed a Digi002 to work with Logic. So, I bought Digidesign hardware to work with Apple software, and Digidesign insisted I pay the full price for Pro Tools for the privilege of using a badly written driver to make one talk to the other! That’s just plain wrong.
This is a warning to all musicians planning to buy Pro Tools hardware. It’s great. But if you want to use other software on it, think again. Or at least buy the whole lot from one place, and get them to make it work. And then, don’t plan on an OS/software/hardware upgrade for a while, as Digidesign’s drivers are the fussiest of things. I wouldn’t bet on Digi CoreAudio Driver’s compatibility with Leopard for a while. Digidesign, I hope you prove me wrong, but I’m pretty sure you won’t.