When I heard about Avid’s Pro Tools First, a free downloadable version of the popular Pro Tools audio suite, I was pretty excited.  Being a Windows user, DAW and MIDI software can be a tricky battleground, on one hand you have promising yet a bit anemic offerings such as Audacity, then you have middle-tier stuff like Reaper, than the old standards such as Cakewalk’s Sonar. 

 I”m a SONAR Producer user now which is a similar model (I think) to what Avid has come forward with - get the core for a low/no cost, then incrementally pay for whatever you want after that.

So I got on the waiting list a few months back and a couple days ago (8/09/2015), I got an email inviting me to download and install.

I downloaded.  The download comes as a very large compressed file which contains a ‘master installer’.  That’s strike one.  These types of installers are great when you have prerequisites sure, but when those prerequisites are from third parties, which in this case some are - you’re asking for trouble and frankly this install has plenty of that.  Windows 7 in particular has a maddening series of compatibility and security setups that don’t play nicely with nested installs.  the reason is simple.  

When you click ‘Run as Administrator’ for one app, Windows gives that app permission to make changes on the machine as admin - but it is very cagey about brokering those permissions to additional apps launched by the first app.  And it should be, don’t you think?  You might trust my app to install something, but do you also know and trust any/all third parties I might bring along with me?  

Strike Two, just in my opinion, came when I saw the installer moving to install PACE and iLok anti piracy software.  I’ve been vocal about this type of stuff in the past, and niche market software developers such as DAW authors are notorious for trying to protect their software by any means they can.

I get this, I do.  You work hard on software, you want to get paid.  That said, if you’re really excellent at writing DAW’s for Windows, which, in and of itself, is nearly a contradiction in terms - mostly because Windows has a pretty badly designed audio subsystem to begin with.  But let’s say you are great at writing DAW applications, and you’ve written them cross platform.  The changes that you are also really great at the nuances of protecting that software via anti-piracy/copy protection are close to a big fat zero.

And you shouldn’t be!  You wouldn’t be expected to maintain this broad expertise as it would clearly limit how good you might be at what you are actually writing your app to do.

So then you rely on third parties, then you have to vouch for all the intero-perability nuances you already deal with for your own software - as well as your partners.

My opinion is this can, and in this case, has lead to a confusing perfect storm of installs that probably tested out on several different configurations, but will likely have big problems on many, many others in the wild.

Another problem with DAW software is you’re typical demographic is what I call ‘consumer artists’.  I’m an outlier.  

Yes, I am a dabbler musician, but I’m also a systems admin level user and a software developer.  This is unlike the vast majority of musicians using this type of software, who simply want and expect it to work and don’t always understand the often nebulous and confusing failure dialogs ‘such and such failed to connect to UDP socket on blah blah’...

These types of people will not chase down the things they don’t understand - especially if it’s core is free.  They will go blank on the issues that come up and eventually give up.

Trust me, this phenomena, and these DAW software issues they are not a rarity.  

I have several times about pulled out my hair with several different DAW’s, for example, SONAR has a lot of potential, but it’s ‘software manager’ approach combined with it’s infuriating use of CleverBridge as it’s payment platform...  The average musician on Windows is likely to just hang it up

My very first impressions are that Pro Tools First, at least the Windows 7 64 bit install, is a bit half-baked.  I struggled through the install, having to repeat multiple steps, having to actually download and install iLok separately, having to try to ignore the various (and pretty meaningless to the user) error and warning dialogs.

But I finally got it to run.  Sort of.  Once it finally executed, it sat unresponsive for about 15 minutes, presented me with dialogs claiming this plug in was missing did I want to move it to ‘unused’ (don’t know?), claiming it couldn’t find this thing or the other - then finally I was able to select a song template. 

I chose rock.  That was 45 minutes ago.  So, running it post-install was not a picnic either and I’ll likely end up reinstalling, updating, rebooting and doing a bunch of other stuff to get it to you know, allow me to author music.

I’m going to keep at this, but let this blog serve as a gentle warning about what you “might” be in for with Pro Tools First.  Results may not be typical and I’m very willing to slog along and give this a proper go.

Before you challenge me on the 101 user stuff, full disclosure, I’m using Windows 7 64 bit on an Intel Core i7 @ 2.4 GHZ.  I have 16 GB of high speed ram, I have an oboard 500GB SSD with a secondary 2 TB high speed drive as well as an outboard 2 TB 7200 RPM drive.  I have an Audiobox USB external audio interface with current drivers which by the way work with SONAR, Audacity, Reaper, and several online collaboration tools.

I’m also a expert level systems administrator and integrator with 20 years experience on Windows, Apple and Linux systems, a former MCSE, a current MCSD, AWS Solutions Developer certified professional.

And I really really want to use Pro Tools First.  I’ll give it every chance I can possibly have the patience for, and I’ll report my results back here on my blog.