Avid Technology : Your Guide to I/O Setup in Pro Tools 12. Improvements and New Features for Music and Post.

My name is Chris Winsor, and I'm one of the product designers on the Pro Tools team here at Avid. I come from a music audio engineering background, but have also been deeply involved in many of the Pro Tools post production workflows for the last seven years.

The I/O Setup is extremely important in how users interface their Pro Tools software based sessions, with their 'out of the box' gear. It has always been a very deep and complicated section of Pro Tools, for both us as developers and for our customers. We've received a lot of feedback over the last few years, and it has encouraged us to make some improvements in this area. What I'd like to do here in this blog post, is walk you through the thinking behind these changes, and explain the new behaviors of I/O Setup in Pro Tools 12. The product design team plans to share more posts like this on feature enhancements and workflows over time.

One of the key things that sparked these changes was the overwhelming large bus buildup that would happen when interchanging sessions between different systems. The original thought was to keep everything all of the time, which created a lot of unused orphaned busses. The question then became, "which busses are safe to get rid of?" This led us down the path of making a distinction between session and hardware, which I will explain a bit more later.

The next area of improvement to focus on was really how important the flexibility of session interchange is to our users workflow. Sessions often travel to different I/O's, of different sizes, that are used in different ways. Some only have stereo outputs, some have surround, and some are used to send the session to an external mixing board. The only way to really ensure that you hear something is to overwrite your own I/O configuration to mirror that of the session, and even then, you might need to do some additional work in the session to hear the intended output. The key thought was - 'Wouldn't it be nice if you could leave your I/O labeling and session routing alone?'