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Avid Pro Tools 11 Sets New Standard for Audio Production

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By Business Wirevia The Motley Fool

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Avid Pro Tools 11 Sets New Standard for Audio Production

Core engine, 64-bit architecture, and expanded metering empower audio professionals to handle the most demanding sessions, compose with more virtual instruments and effects, and collaborate directly with Media Composer editors

LAS VEGAS–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Avid®(Nasdaq: AVID)today announced Avid Pro Tools® 11, a major upgrade of its industry-leading digital audio workstation that redefines music and audio production for today’s workflows. This latest version enables audio professionals to take on the most demanding productions with new, high-powered audio and video engines, 64-bit architecture, expanded metering, and direct HD video workflows.

“Pro Tools 11 represents a quantum leap in creative power,” said Chris Gahagan, senior vice president of Products and Services at Avid. “The newly designed architecture turbo-charges production with more plug-in processing, the ability to run more virtual instruments—and a host of new features—letting users create ambitiously, without holding anything back.”

Pro Tools 11 delivers the features, performance, and workflows professionals need to take on today’s increasingly complex sessions and tighter timelines. Key benefits and features include:

  • Fully redesigned audio engine and 64-bit architecture

    • New Avid Audio Engine — Delivers multiple times the processing power of Pro Tools 10 on the same hardware configurations.
    • 64-bit architecture — Exponentially increases the number of simultaneous virtual instruments and the performance to handle the most sophisticated sessions.
    • Offline bounce — Delivers mixes up to 150 times faster than real time.
    • Low-latency input buffer — Ensures ultra-low latency record monitoring without sacrificing plug-in performance.
    • Dynamic host processing — Maximizes plug-in count by reallocating processing resources as needed.
  • Expanded metering

    • Extended standards support — Features a broad range of built-in metering standards, from peak and average to VU and PPM, to maintain adherence to regional broadcast requirements.
    • Gain reduction — Shows gain reduction for all dynamics plug-ins on each channel.
  • Direct HD video workflows

    • Built-in Avid Video Engine — Enables audio post professionals to play and edit a wide range of HD video formats including Avid DNxHD®, directly in the Pro Tools timeline without transcoding, using the same core engine as in Media …read more

      Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance

Linux

A fresh new KMix

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KMix is KDE’s forgotten redheaded stepchild.

Humble beginnings

It is old, has been maintained my Christian Esken since early 2001, and has grown organically. Through no fault of Christian’s or anyone else’s, it is buggy, messy, and nobody else wants to help fix it, or at least has the constitution to do so.

Us redheads need to stick together.

At last year’s Randa, I started working on refactoring and rebuilding KMix from the ground up. Why should adjusting the volume in your desktop be so frustrating? It shouldn’t, thats why.

KMix is back with a new edition~

That is the prototype for the new KMix. The UI design has been shamelessly stolen from pavucontrol:

pavucontrol

As you can see, there is much work left to do. However, I feel that it is ready for others to hack on and test. This restructuring of KMix contains a *lot* of the original KMix code that has been contributed to over the years by over 142(!) people. The biggest committers have been Christian Esken (601), Colin Guthrie (130), and Laurent Montel (123). Mad props to those people and everyone else involved for their work and dedication.

When I started out on this endeavor, I aimed to fix a number of issues I had encountered before:

  • Sometimes at startup, your volume would be all kinds of broken since the KDED module, Tray application, and a session startup script would all sometimes try to restore the volumes and sometimes it just wouldn’t.
  • The GUI was completely rebuilt with every device change. Back in the early days of KMix, hot-pluggable audio devices wasn’t a major use case so it wasn’t included in the design.
  • Since there is no one process that controls all the volume everywhere, that means lots and lots of backend libraries and their respective data structures loaded into many processes, such as plasma, the tray application, the KDED module, the tiny script at startup that restores your volumes.
  • All these different points of control had to make sure they didn’t step on each others toes all the time.
  • To control the volume over dbus, the tray application had to be running. There was no dbus autolaunch, and why would you want a GUI application to automatically launch and do weird things when you just want a small script to turn down your volume between the hours of 3 am and 6 am?
  • pavucontrol had neat VU meters
  • I’m just kinda okay at UI and UX design for end-users.

In response, I’ve come up with the following design:

  • There exists a unique daemon on the session bus at org.kde.kmixd, which is managed via dbus autolaunch
  • This unique daemon supports multiple backends being loaded at once, such as ALSA and PulseAudio (note: currently requires commenting out an if statement)
  • Clients don’t need to worry about learning the oddities of ALSA or PulseAudio control since all interaction happens over the bus in a backend-agnostic manner. You are given …read more
    Source: FULL ARTICLE at Planet KDE