noob in need of pro tools advice/reassurance

[team_racket]

hello all. i never post here, but im a bit lost at the moment. the time has arisen where i need some help. basically i have just started uni. its a course called creative sound and music and we are currently receiving a lot of training in the studio environment and also song writing. pro tools i have been told, is used in a lot of professional industries, and that it features heavily in my course. i have been thinking about purchasing the mbox 2 and pro tools le package for around £300. thing is, in the past year i have purchased a new pc and although i am fully aware that the package im looking at is apparently compatible with xp, ive heard problems can occur when using the setup on xp and that it runs better on a mac. firstly i dont want to shell out money for a mac when i have a pc, and secondly i dont want to pay £300 for all sorts of problems when using that package on xp.

basically iam seeking reassurance and would like to know if anyone uses pro tools or an mbox via xp, and if it is reliable. if it works fine on xp i would like to know. would i need anything outside the package to get it running on xp? am i exaggerating the chance of problems ?

many thanks for your time, any advice greatly appreciated :thumb:

[cadencethefire]

hello all. i never post here, but im a bit lost at the moment. the time has arisen where i need some help. basically i have just started uni. its a course called creative sound and music and we are currently receiving a lot of training in the studio environment and also song writing. pro tools i have been told, is used in a lot of professional industries, and that it features heavily in my course. i have been thinking about purchasing the mbox 2 and pro tools le package for around £300. thing is, in the past year i have purchased a new pc and although i am fully aware that the package im looking at is apparently compatible with xp, ive heard problems can occur when using the setup on xp and that it runs better on a mac. firstly i dont want to shell out money for a mac when i have a pc, and secondly i dont want to pay £300 for all sorts of problems when using that package on xp.

basically iam seeking reassurance and would like to know if anyone uses pro tools or an mbox via xp, and if it is reliable. if it works fine on xp i would like to know. would i need anything outside the package to get it running on xp? am i exaggerating the chance of problems ?

many thanks for your time, any advice greatly appreciated :thumb:


that's all we record on with our band. It's just as stable as on the mac.

what kind of PC you runnin on?

[team_racket]

that's all we record on with our band. It's just as stable as on the mac.

what kind of PC you runnin on?

spec of my pc is p4 3.00ghz, 1.00 gb of ram. i was wondering wether it would be stable as on a mac. the pro tools package is a big investment for me.

[Moseph]

Pro Tools 7.0 should be just as well tested either Mac or PC, and subsequently equally stable.

If you buy new, you'll be getting Pro Tools LE that is based on version 7.x of the larger packages.

Even if you buy used, Pro Tools has been pretty popular on PC since about version 5. That was something like 6 years ago I think. You'd be hard pressed to actually find a copy anymore.

[cadencethefire]

spec of my pc is p4 3.00ghz, 1.00 gb of ram. i was wondering wether it would be stable as on a mac. the pro tools package is a big investment for me.

you'll be fine, i'd say up the ram a little bit and dedicate the machine to recording. Or you can make a separate profile with the windows classic settings in appearance, turn off clear type and all the menu faders. And be extra sure you're not recording to the same hard drive that your OS/ pro tools is installed to...

if you want to be REALLY cool, get two extra hard drives, an internal hard drive and an external firewire drive, os on primary drive, pro tools on secondary drive and all your recorded data on the firewire drive :)

[Moseph]

if you want to be REALLY cool, get two extra hard drives, an internal hard drive and an external firewire drive, os on primary drive, pro tools on secondary drive and all your recorded data on the firewire drive :)


I'd call that overkill. Also, I'm unsure about whether that grants any additonal benefits for streaming audio (I guess if the secondary hard drive is faster it makes a lot of sense).

I realize Pro Tools LE isn't exactly optimized well, but I'm running a computer with only 1.8 Ghz processing and 1 GB of RAM and I have no issues doing most projects. However, I'm running Cubase (though from I understand, Cubase is more intensive on the processor visually, so it might actually be less efficient to run).