“Shares of Avid Technology fell more than 14% on Tuesday, after the company, which makes editing products for digital media, said its audio business was struggling during the third quarter,” R.M. Schneiderman reports for Forbes. “The reason: a sales dip of its Pro Tools HD editing software.”
“In early August, Avid said it would release a version of Pro Tools that is compatible with Apple’s new Intel-based Mac Pro. Avid expected a drop off in its older version of Pro Tools, which is based on Apple’s G5 Macintosh computers,” Schneiderman reports. “On Tuesday, however, the company said in a press release that this slackening has had a greater-than-expected effect due to ‘the significant improvement in the price/performance of the new Intel-based Mac platform.'”
Schneiderman reports, “The Intel Mac Pro version of Pro Tools has been available since Sept. 18, but new orders have not sufficiently offset the sales declines of the older product.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, what are you guys and gals buying instead, Apple’s Logic Pro?
Logic pro is hard to beat. It’s greatly improved under apple’s flag.
A number of family members work in TV, and I know that their shops had been holding off (on hardware and software) until the Intel native Avid products were available.
I have a very fast Cable ISP and this site is slower than frozen molasses loading up. Are your LINUX servers unable to keep up?
Dude,
He’s right. Your servers seem to be super stressed. I guess it doesn’t pay to be popular.
I’ve used ProTools… it’s most recent release was buggy so we’re sticking with Cubase until the upgrade to the macpro… then we’re going with logic pro.
No. Digital Performer.
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diginonperformer you mean… lol
;-p
“Logic pro is hard to beat.”
It’s has nothing to do with Logic canibalizing Pro Tools sales, it’s because audio pros are holding of on upgrading/Intel switch until 3rd party plug-ins are available in universal binary.
AVID is a steal @ $36.00 a share… time to load up. 6 months it’ll be $50.
Nothng is better than Pro-Tools for recording and editing….
ProTools GUI is superior to anything else including Apple’s Logic which is not user friendly at all.
We also have a fast cable connection (Comcast @ 6 mbps) and Mac Daily News pages sometimes seem very slow to load to me as well…
“Logic pro is hard to beat.”
That is simply not true.
“It’s greatly improved under apple’s flag.”
Neither is that. Quite simply Logic has stagnated since being bought out by Apple. The only noticeable improvements being an improved GUI and plug-in delay compensation. Beyond that we’ve had three chargeable updates and all we have to show for it is a few extra software instruments. We’ve practically stopped selling Logic Pro, because there is no call for it and this is the same across the board. If you want the MIDI spec of Logic get Digital Performer. If you want to edit and record audio its got to be Pro Tools.
What’s more Apple still doesn’t have Logic supporting all for cores in a Quad G5, but conveniently it supports all four in a Mac Pro. Why do I get the feeling Apple is going to forget about the quad G5 owners??
Nope, as a veteran audio engineer I’d say that Apple gives Digidesign (Avid’s audio division) a good competition at the low end of the market but can’t touch it’s high-end offerings like Pro Tools HD-based ICON console which has become a standard in Hollywood and recording studios around the world in two years – a sensational market penetration. BTW, Pro Tools HD is the high-end DSP card-based system so for Pro Tools HD it doesn’t really matter that much how faster the host Mac is as the processing is done by dedicated PCI cards which have X-times the power of even the fastest CPUs. It’s not that Pro Tools HD users would be switching to Logic which is simply not the right tool for a film mixing or major label recording, the problem is more that practically every professional recording studio on the planet already owns Pro Tools HD so the market is pretty saturated.
…and one more thing. When are they finally going to ge trid of all the legacy code from Notator days?
I am lucky enough to have a career making records for a living and I use pro tools every day.
Oooh man, now you got me started…
Avid/Digiesign has turned into a company that uses it’s market share against it’s customers and I am glad to see that is translating into sales (or the lack there of). The design of their products make obvious that market dominance is a higher priority than innovation and I deal with the ramifications of their extra crappy/buggy code every day.
My favorite digi complaint is that they habitually deny features to their customers that their competition offers. In order bounce a software instrument to an audio track, you have to route it to another track and record it in real time. Automatic delay compensation is included in every major competitor of Pro-tools and yet they deny it too their LE customers. Two HD system functions ‘mysteriously appear’ on your LE system if you pay the $500 producers pack ransom. Sure you get Smack and some other garbage plug in’s but Beat Detective and the sudden ability to use more tracks mysteriously appears like magic. This translates into the fact that your of the shelf LE system is capable of these things out of the box and they cripple them until you have the producers pack ilok authorization. Bad business. I hope they bleed money just long enough to get their sh** together.
Most SW companies can make money by taking advantage of platform-like changes, but Avid has blown it.
Avid should have reduced the PPC price of Pro Tools while giving away a universal update – but to that same version.
Avid should have then delayed the new release of Pro Tools, pushing that verion out some until spring ’07.
This gives “holdouts” very litte incentive, while giving people a lot of incentive to purchase the current solution now – while knowing it will go universal and they would get that universal “cross-grade” for free.
Just dumb.
I agree with bom619.
I understand the fact that they want to differentiate LE from HD/TDM, but the hardware does it already (more I/Os, better sample rate 48/96K vs 96/192K, zero latency monitoring, better converters, upgradability: you can start with one card+ one interface up to… piece by piece…).
The software limitations of ProTools LE are insane, specially since Mac & PCs are now dual/quad core.
Since Avid bought M-Audio and the release of Pro Tools for M-Audio interfaces, I thought that Avid’s Digidesign would focus on the mid-range and high-end markets, but no! The only new hardware are the MBOX 2 and MBOX 2 PRO which compete with M-Audio products in price and specs. Nothing yet to replace the 001/002/002R family and/or bridge the gap between ProTools LE and HD (which by the way is now ridiculously expensive).
“Two HD system functions ‘mysteriously appear’ on your LE system if you pay the $500 producers pack ransom.”
Likewise a lot of the Logic Pro functions appear for Logic Express users who pay the $700 Logic Pro Ransom. All these features are there built into the software and disabled when you buy Logic Express.
haven’t worked with logic since…early 6.x days. Did they improve on DNA grooves yet – or do they still disappear after been added as templates in the groove drop-down? Does the internal sound editor still look like 1989? Do they still overwrite inported audiofiles with a .dup file? That last thing must be the joke of the century. Is it still impossible to link audio editing tasks to an external editor, like Peak or dedicated stuff like Kyma X?
Ringo, you work with kyma?! Holy shite…I saw that thing a coupla years back in a huge studio in Paris – i mean i heard it. Crazy stuff abit too scifi GUI for me tho.
I might lose my Apple Fanboy license for this, but…
I use Adobe Audition. I have access to whatever software I want and have used many different audio and video apps since the beginning, but I *really* like Adobe Audition and it’s very much worth booting into Windows to use it on my MacBook Pro.
I really hope Audition for the Mac comes out with CS3.
Better yet, I hope Apple buys Adobe.
if i just spent 50,000$ 2 years ago outfitting my sound stage with g5’s and new HD gear, and it is working perfectly fine why would i want to spend even more money just because apple decided to switch processors and make everyone spend more money to port all their already working software?
this drop has nothing to do with logic audio, and everything to do with
the fact that studios don’t drop cash on every new shiny thing that comes out.
– post production dude.
not everything revolves around apples little halo
<— also a mac fanatic
I’ve made a living doing digital audio since the late 80’s.
DigiDesign ProTools is the best. The interface is easy to use, does not stifle creativity, and it’s reliable. Unfortunately ProTools hardware is tremendously overpriced. Digi does not support or acknowledge Apple loops or any of the other system level Apple stuff. Digi hardware only works right with their software and makes a lousy audio interface for anything except Digi software. If you try to add any other audio hardware to pick up the slack then you’ve got lots of problems so it all boils down to DigiDesign stuff being so darned expensive, quirkly and proprietary, people are buying alternatives.
Logic totally sucks and that’s the truth. I wish it were different. I have a full node of Logic Pro and a node of Logic Express. The interface is possibly the worst on the planet, very surprising since Logic spawned Garageband which has one of the best interfaces on the planet. Apple trys to portray Logic as a more powerful Garageband but the problem is, the terminology and the whole design of Logic is so queer and foreign to anyone who has ever actually worked in a recording studio that Logic fails miserably.
Digital Performer is unreliable. It is feature packed and looks slick but don’t be fooled. It is by far the most unreliable of any of the professional audio packages on the Mac and that is too bad. I wish DP was reliable, I tried for years to like it and hope that the bugs would get squashed. I stopped installing it at version 4.5. After I acquire a new Mac Pro I might upgrade DP again and give it another try since I have several of their interfaces (midi and audio).
DigiDesign problems really started to get big when they tried to include the PC world. People on the PC have no allegiance. PC support watered down the DigiDesign hardware and software (same for Avid stuff). Apple got tired of waiting for a vendor to really support the Mac with pro products so under Steve Jobs leadership they got seriously back in the software business with Final Cut Pro. Oh how I wish they would put the FCPro designers on cleaning up the design of Logic Pro. I’d update Logic in a heart beat if it only operated as smoothly and simply as ProTools.
By the way, Logic has the BEST SOUND QUALITY of any software on the Mac. We found it hard to believe at first but done several double blind shoot outs that have all verified this simple and surprising truth.
It is too bad that Logic is such a queer piece of software. The plugins sound fantastic and the overall sound quality of the software is fantastic but the overall function and operation of Logic is total crap.
ProTools is often critisized for having poor midi support but I’ll take predictability and reliability over whizzy graphics and goofy operation. ProTools doesn’t look like much but it works reliably and that’s THE most important thing to somebody using a tool to make a living.
DigiDesign should spin off the division that makes all those huge consoles and stuff for touring artists, then see if that division can make a go of it. I suspect that hardware has very limited demand and a very limited number of people who will support it.
On the other hand, I’d easily pay a $1000 (same as Logic) for a full featured version of ProTools that would run native on Mac hardware with good plugins and good Audio Unit support. I’ll take Apogee hardware over DigiDesign anyday.
I’m a video guy and I use Final Cut and Avid Express almost daily. I can do the same thing with both applications but I prefer Final Cut because it is more user friendly. I’m much more efficient using it. I agree with bom619. It’s about time Avid started taking hits. The company hasn’t been innovative in years. They treat their customers like crap. If Apple had the type of resellers for Final Cut like Avid does for it’s products, Final Cut would take over as the standard of video editing.