Mbox with pro tools 9

The market for compact desktop interfaces with a couple of preamps is highly competitive, and there are numerous rivals offering similar feature sets. Apogee's stylish Duet is, likewise, slimmer in feature terms than the Mbox, but will be an attractive alternative for Mac users. There are three products in the revamped Mbox range. The Mini seems to be a USB 1. There's also a large volume control for the main stereo outputs, which presumably also controls the level at the single headphone output.

Sample rates up to kHz are supported, and there is a total of eight inputs and outputs. Four of the former have mic preamps, and two of these can also accept DI'd electric guitars. Two separate headphone outputs each have their own volume controls. To these it adds some more advanced monitor control features, such as Mute and Alt Source buttons, and the ability to select up to three speaker outputs.

Alternatives The market for compact desktop interfaces with a couple of preamps is highly competitive, and there are numerous rivals offering similar feature sets. Pros Solid build quality. Sounds good, with better preamps than previous Mboxes. DSP gives us monitoring reverb and a nice guitar tuner.

It has a Mono button! Cons Routing line inputs through the preamps won't suit everyone. Still shipping with the outdated Pro Tools 8 at the moment. Prices include VAT. Prices are MSRP. Test Spec Mbox package 1. Tested with Pro Tools 9 and Steinberg Cubase 5. Buy PDF version. Previous article Next article. New forum posts Re: how much is important Artist name?

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There is a new FREE How To Build an Equipment Rack These specifications, with the exception of the width of the rack, are adjustable.

They should be made to the That doesn't make them any less of a big deal, though, and together they amount to a massive shot in the arm for Pro Tools as a native system. All of them have been described in detail in previous SOS articles, so I won't go into detail, but here's an outline of what you can expect:. Beat Detective is an automated editing tool for knocking wayward drum performances into shape, and although it's quite long in the tooth now, I've yet to find a better alternative.

As it happens, just before the review period I had exactly such a performance that I wanted to conform to a rigid tempo grid.

All of the Elastic Audio modes compromised the sound to an unacceptable extent, especially on floor toms. Beat Detective in action. Here, I've just analysed the Snare track and hit 'Add Unique' to combine its triggers with those generated from the Kick track.

This allows you to gather together a composite set of 'triggers' — say, from kick and snare drum tracks — and apply them to all your drum tracks simultaneously, thus preserving phase relationships between them. For some reason, the first time I tried this in PT9 it wouldn't let me collect anything, but after that, it worked as expected. For more advanced video work, though, you'll want to add the Complete Production Toolkit 2, which enables HD features such as multiple up to 64!

Assigning a VCA fader to multiple audio tracks in your mix allows you to raise or lower their levels simultaneously with one fader move.

The benefits of working in this way may seem subtle at first, but can be substantial in practice. Here, I have two guitar tracks, each of which has its own volume automation graph.

These tracks are, in turn, assigned to a Mix Group controlled by the VCA track below, which has a further layer of automation. The blue lines show the resulting composite automation graph for each track.

Hand in hand with VCA groups comes a slew of advanced automation features, again available for the first time in a native system thanks to the Complete Production Toolkit 2. These are too many and too complex to describe in full here, but include various useful ways to write multiple layers of automation for a single fader, which can later be 'coalesced' to a single curve, plus support for snapshot automation, where settings for the entire Pro Tools mixer, or any subset of its parameters, can be stored and recalled for individual sections of a Session.

Again, most of these features were introduced or updated in Pro Tools HD 7. Also included as standard are the more powerful version of the Digibase browser, complete with Catalogs, and the Export Session as Text option. Oh, and remote control of Avid's PRE mic preamps is now universal as well, though I don't suppose there are many of these about in native systems. Pro Tools 9 is an unusual update, in that nearly all of its 'new' features aren't new at all.

Admittedly, support for ASIO and Core Audio is a deal that's about as big as they come, but apart from that, almost everything was already there in HD. In practice, this is not an issue unless you need to use large sample libraries, but it probably needs to happen soon. At a stroke, they have removed almost all the frustrations afflicting the many users who wanted or needed to belong to the Pro Tools world, but lacked the budget to go HD.

The same is not likely to be true of HD users, though. Unless you want to take advantage of the ability to run a native Pro Tools rig when away from the studio, there's almost nothing in Pro Tools 9 HD that wasn't in 8. I do better work in it, and I do it faster. Avid's pricing positions it squarely in the DAW pack: around the same as the full versions of Cubase and Digital Performer and slightly dearer than Logic Pro or Sonar, though if anything, it's perhaps the much cheaper and highly customisable Reaper that can most closely match Pro Tools' functionality.

Each of its rivals can boast features that the basic Pro Tools 9 lacks, but the reverse is also true; this is no longer 'crippleware', but a very powerful tool. While the Core Audio implementation appears pretty solid, ASIO support in Pro Tools 9 still feels a little immature, both in comparison with other applications such as Cubase, and with Avid's own hardware drivers.

If you're planning on using a Windows system, check carefully that your preferred audio hardware works properly: the AIR Users' Blog maintains an unofficial list at www. But it's already very usable with the right interfaces, and this is such an important and central issue that I'm sure Avid and other manufacturers will be working to improve it. In other respects, Pro Tools 9 is remarkably free of bugs and teething troubles, because so much of its functionality has already been tried and tested in the HD world.

Having used Pro Tools 9, I'm no longer sceptical about Avid's new corporate openness. In fact, it's exciting to speculate about where it might lead next. VST and Audio Units support? The release of an open RTAS software development kit? Macro support? Full session compatibility with other DAWs? If enough of us say we want it, there's a good chance Avid will implement it. Until then, I'm off for a skate on the River Styx However, there are one or two neat additions that weren't in Pro Tools 8, and a couple of them are really useful.

Top of my list is the 'New Track' routing option that appears when you click on a track send or output slot right. Now you can do it all in one go. Select New Track, and Pro Tools will not only ask you what sort of track you want to create, but automatically assign an unused bus to it, and rename that bus into the bargain. And, of course, the usual Pro Tools shortcuts apply, so holding down Alt will route all tracks or sends to the new track, and Shift-Alt will route all outputs or sends on selected tracks.