Of course you can connect a mouse and use it the old fashioned way, but when you approach the screen with a pen you find yourself working in a different way. It allows you to fly around the screen and perform any task you can do with a mouse but in a more hands on and connected way. You can see what’s going on, and get down to fine detail. The pen is awesome, it’s a far better experience. The only trouble is that at this resolution the knobs and controls are so small that my fat fingers have difficulty grabbing what I want to grab – maybe it’s time to try the pen out. Pro Tools on the whole responds really well to single touch control – it all works, you can grab anything, including the tools and move every parameter and move clips about, edit notes, automation – the whole lot. The Fast Track offers much better quality audio, reliability and has better inputs for recording things. Using a simple unpowered hub I can add the iLok and the Fast Track without any trouble at all. Of course we then run into our single USB port problem, but don’t worry, we’ll stick in a hub and see what happens. So it’s not exactly graceful but Pro Tools can work with the onboard sound but it’s just a bit of a fiddle.Ī better alternative would be to use a proper USB audio interface, like the Avid Fast Track Duo that I’m using here. If you then pull the cable out while Pro Tools is playing it will stop and throw up an error – but it recovers if you put the cable back. There may be another way to do it in Pro tools, so perhaps you could have both outputs selected and then change them within Pro Tools but that somehow seems even more complicated. Whenever you change anything in the ASIO4All settings Pro Tools complains and has to restart, which is a little unfriendly. In the ASIO4All settings you can select both the speaker and headphone output or swap between the two. Pro Tools only sees what the ASIO4All wrapper has wrapped up and so has no knowledge of you plugging in the headphones. Windows appears to treat the speakers and headphone outputs as completely different entities, so in order to use the output socket we have to change the priority to the headphones. Here’s a bit of an oddity – if you plug in headphones you’ll find that you still get output from the speakers, it doesn’t seem to automatically switch when you plug-in. Quality of playback through the on-board speakers? It’s all right, it’s a bit like a laptop, sounds ok. There’s another setting in Display to reduce the text size of certain elements – if you change the title bar text to any different point size and hit Apply it all comes back into line – sadly this goes back to being messed up the next time you run Pro Tools so it’s probably best just to leave it. The top toolbar is a little messed up though – the words seem to run into each other. It’s getting too small now for effective use of the fingers, but maybe not for the pen – maybe this is where the pen will come into its own, if you want to work at these sorts of resolutions. Moving the slider to the smallest and you can fit forty faders across – that’s pretty extraordinary. Checking the display settings we find that by default the Surface is on the third of four desktop scaling settings so in the Surface world this is actually pretty scaled pretty big. At the default scaling you can get the whole project on screen along with 27 fully wide faders. A couple of clicks and it’s full screen again. Pro Tools appears to have got confused about the resolution and started up maximised but in a corner. When you open up the demo song the first thing you notice is how incredibly small everything is. Luckily there’s an awesome application called ASIO4ALL which wraps up regular WDM drivers into a nice ASIO driver which Pro Tools understands ( enables us to use the Surface’s on-board audio, plug in some headphones and be completely mobile without having to plug-in a proper audio interface. Pro Tools can’t deal with regular Windows audio drivers – it needs an ASIO driver or it won’t get past the splash screen. Here’s the YouTube version, for the text please skip below.įirst of all can we run it on just the Surface without having to plug anything else in? Well you’ll need an iLok which will take up the single USB port. Let’s see how it flies with the Surface Pro 3. Right then, Pro Tools – this is one of the more fussy bits of music software.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |