i've been asked quite a bit lately about what's going on with Pro Tools First it's been off of
their website for quite a while now so i did send an email to Avid to see what's going on with it
i didn't hear back from them but i did find some bad news of what's going on with it right now
so we'll look at that but i also want to look at why this might be a good thing for the future
of a free Pro Tools First option about a month ago i was doing a video on making music with
the included software that came with the Focusrite Scarlett Solo interfaces and one of the free DAWs
is Pro Tools First with the Focusrite creative pack so i went to Focusrite's website to see if
there was an update on that because i did know that Pro Tools First has been down on the Avid
site for a while and when i got to the Focusrite site there was something that said it was down for
a bit as they were working on it but it would come back so i thought that's cool Pro Tools
first we'll be back they're just working on it making it better however when i've gone back again
it looks like Pro Tools First is discontinued and this is also said on the avid site now it does say
it's discontinued so there is no more Pro Tools First at the time being so thinking about a couple
of reasons why this might be one reason could be that log4j hack and that whole mess that's
gone on with that because i do know with Pro Tools first you have to be online to use it so
maybe that's a thing i kind of don't think that is the reason and here's what might be a good
reason why they've discontinued Pro Tools First because this software is supposed to be your first
introduction to Pro Tools and as you probably know pro tools first is limiting and there's absolutely
no customer support for it so not really a good first impression for somebody who's just getting
into music making and they're likely going to be pushed away from Pro Tools and not come back to it
once they're a little more experienced in music production so maybe this free
offering that's supposed to be bringing in more people to pro tools might actually be turning
more people away again this is just me thinking out loud about this it might not be the reason
but i'm sure this had to have been discussed by avid at some point within their company so Pro
Tools First is dead right now what does it mean if you already registered your pro tools first
and you currently use it well you can still continue using it i've tested it i can still use
it i can still record to it i'm not too sure how long the cloud functionality will work for it but
it is working right now and if you've registered it but you haven't downloaded it or installed it
on your computer yet i've noticed that you still can go into your Avid account and download it and
install it so if you registered it and you were currently using Pro Tools First or you wanted to
use it and you did register it you can continue to use the last version of Pro Tools First that
they released so here's me thinking positive about this situation so Pro Tools Ffirst is dead
it's no more but what if this makes room for another free Pro Tools offering maybe
one that's not as limiting and more in line with their premium offering now here's what
i would propose as a free offering from Pro Tools that's going to get people excited about getting
into Pro Tools right away and also keep them there as they get more experienced in music production
and what i would do is Pro Tools LE this was a version of Pro Tools that a lot of us home studio
users started out with likely using an mbox or a digi rack something like that and it worked so
here's what i recommend giving with Pro Tools LE well i would limit the tracks to 16 which is a lot
so 16 tracks and i would also allow for 16 buses and that's quite a bit for somebody who's just
getting into music production they likely won't need more until they get a little further along
also i wouldn't limit the number of tracks that could be recorded at the same time and if they do
limit it i would limit it at eight tracks that way a drummer who wants to do a full drum kit
mic setup they could still do that in Pro Tools LE another change that i would make from the Pro
Tools First model is to allow people to bring in their own AAX plugins into Pro Tools LE and still
give those excellent standard avid core plug-ins like compressors the delay the d verb the eqs
and those types of standard plug-ins like that i'm not talking about the bomb factory plug-ins
those could be an extra add-on that somebody could pay for if they wanted but allow people to bring
in their own aax plugins that they may have bought from another place or maybe they got it for free
and don't limit them to only being allowed to purchase them from the avid marketplace
so this is a more modern idea of Pro Tools LE of course they could call it something
else if they wanted but the basic principle of the 16 tracks and allowing people to bring in
their own plugins if they wanted to i think it's going to entice people to use Pro Tools and get
used to that excellent workflow that Pro Tools offers and it's going to keep them in the program
and they'll likely purchase the subscription once they get more into music production now check out
an excellent unlimited alternative to Pro Tools by clicking the video on the screen and if you
like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for Audio Ttech TV I'm Zane keep creating and we'll talk soon