Pro Tools Update Subscription is Doubling July 1st (for Perpetual Licenses)

[\RU]

Wow...So glad that I started using Reaper early this year. I'm not going to renew my perpetual PT license any more. Who would surrender their perpetual license to "crossgrade" to subscription?!

[Spencer Maddox]

“Crossgrades from Perpetual to Subscription will require to surrender the current license you have”

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[Danilo Villanova]

I suspect REAPER and Studio One are going to have an influx of new users...

[Passing Bye]

Doubt many serious ones, that are making a living using Pro Tools, gonna jump ships because of 100 bucks...

[noiseboyuk]

Doubt many serious ones, that are making a living using Pro Tools, gonna jump ships because of 100 bucks...

I think the direction of travel is very clear - Pro Tools will rule forever in Audio Post, but will become steadily eroded over time for music use. The cost of a few licenses for full studios is trivial, but less so for individuals. Moreover, there are less and less compelling reasons to stay with PT. So I think we'll see music studios increasingly offering other DAWs alongside PT due to client demand.

For many years PT has been the poor relation for VI work - I'd have thought that among KVR members, PT users are in single digits percentage-wise. Ableton has the entire dance market already covered, and between Cubase, Studio One and Logic they are slowly eroding all other types of music. I do all my music work in Cubase despite owning PT Ultimate, not just because of the midi side, but having VariAudio integrated right into the timeline is 100x better to me that backing and forthing with ReVoice Pro and Meldodyne in PT, which still doesn't support ARA.

In short, there's no compelling reason for most musicians to stick with PT, doubly so when the annual price hike jumps by 101%. If there were no alternative people would of course pay, but there is.

EDIT - very interesting Gearslutz post here from someone confirming all the above. For music use, very slowly Pro Tools is dying. https://www.gearslutz.com/board/showpos ... stcount=79

[Forgotten]

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-p ... rade-plans

Q - Will Avid still offer BOTH perpetual and subscription offerings?

A - We will continue to offer perpetual pricing as an option. However, going forward the preferred pricing model will be subscription-based pricing, because this is the direction of the entire industry and the way people would prefer to license software.

What a bunch of bullshit. The company might prefer a subscription model, but it's pretty obvious from just about any thread on subscriptions that the majority of consumers do not like it and prefer perpetual licensing.

[Mathematics]

I'm not surrendering anything. PT 2018 is one of the more stable versions since 2011, AFAIK. I'll just keep using it until it no longer works. That could be 10 years, easily.

Avid opens with "following a trend, " and not with "this is highly requested." It's obvious they aren't listening. If they didn't get a clue with Adobe losing lifelong customers to BlacMagicD, FCP, Vegas, and other NLEs, they'll get a clue when many of us stop renewing. The only customers they'll have are studios. Here's the thing, since people will be ditching PT because of this ludicrous business shift, projects will be done naively in everything else other than PT. See where this is going?They're burying themselves because they think they're Adobe.

Anyway, I'm not a business analyst, and like you all that are shifted because of this...I share the concern. I'm looking at better alternatives. PT is so outdated. It may easy to use and has AudioSuite, but so are Cubase and Nuendo (I'm learning, they are really good and close alternatives), wipe the floor with Avid. So long PT. I'm not surrendering my license though...no way...no how.

[Passing Bye]

In short, there's no compelling reason for most musicians to stick with PT

Agree.

[Tj Shredder]

I needed to watch a single video to start editing in Resolve on a useful level without prior experience in video work. I definitely should see how it acts as DAW...
Thats is a flat learning curve...

[LawrenceF]

In short, there's no compelling reason for most musicians to stick with PT,

Yes. That's likely true in the more general sense. I suppose it would depend on what kind of musician and if the thing is being subsidized in some way and some other considerations.

Pro Tools was conceived as an engineering product, a replacement for tape, not really so much a music production product in the more modern sense of the current state of doing that, though it certainly does that now. The real question is …

"Why would anyone spend hundreds of dollars a year updating a software product if it's not being subsidized in some way?"

... and the most obvious answer is really just...

"Because they can easily afford it, are comfortable with it, and they just want to."

Otherwise … there's certainly much less expensive options for making music.

[whyterabbyt]

I stopped my PT subscription at 2018, when they made it Win10 only (but kept the f**king dumb requirement for Quicktime for importing video(*))

At the time it was a weird 'maintainance plan' subscription/update hybrid; I had a perpetual license, but the option was that you paid $99 a year for updates and/or $99 a year for support (with some plugin licenses thrown in). Im not sure if this combines the two separate subscriptions, though I sort of suspect it. But $99 per year was as much as I would pay, since I have access to a work license anyway.

Im still a bit concerned about this, though; if the cost of our education subscription doubles (we have 15 seats) then it starts to get much harder to justify having as many.


(* For anyone who hasnt worked out why that's f**king dumb, Quicktime was never supported on Windows 10, the available installer wont actually work on Windows10, and all support for Windows was dropped at the beginning of 2016 despite known security issues...)

[Tj Shredder]

If I were a student I would rather learn a different tool first. I guess if you know Reaper/Nuendo or similar, just working in Protools would still be easy. For teaching studio production, I would cancel all but one license. If all schools would do that, Avid would start to recognize their epic fault. For that, schools would need to act together though. (And students could still learn on the free cloud based version. And learn that way that the cloud sucks as well...)
I bet Avid would lower the educational prices in return though...
Its a shame that a nice and intuitive program has no future for dumb reasons...

[whyterabbyt]

If I were a student I would rather learn a different tool first.

But I'd rather teach them PT first, because they're almost all working on sound or dialogue for videos or installations, and it's what they'll find in any post studio.

If ours have used anything its usually only Audacity, but I'll have students who've never done anything audio putting a soundtrack for a video together after teaching them only three tools.

And we make a point of making sure our students get access to the tools they'll find in industry. If we didnt, we wouldn't be doing our jobs properly. Adobe and Autodesk are just as painful as Avid, but they still get taught Photoshop, Illustrator, Maya, 3DMax etc

[Mathematics]

I know...the whole Quicktime thing is absolute nonsense. For the record, AnyVideoConverter converts almost anything to a nice SD widescreen/full-sized video...even better than the paid software, and is very PT compatible.

https://www.any-video-converter.com/pro ... ideo_free/

I'm getting one more update plan before the price gets flushed down the toilet and no longer renewing after that. I'm switching over to either Nuendo/Cubase for post.

[elxsound]

If I were a student I would rather learn a different tool first. I guess if you know Reaper/Nuendo or similar, just working in Protools would still be easy. For teaching studio production, I would cancel all but one license. If all schools would do that, Avid would start to recognize their epic fault. For that, schools would need to act together though. (And students could still learn on the free cloud based version. And learn that way that the cloud sucks as well...)
I bet Avid would lower the educational prices in return though...
Its a shame that a nice and intuitive program has no future for dumb reasons...

It’s not the schools that are keeping Avid chugging along, it’s the incredibly slow changing industry that makes it a necessity to learn it as a primary tool.

That industry is not really affected by this change, so don’t expect the same level of outrage.