After a few increasingly terse emails with the (interstate) retailer, it’s beginning to look more and more like I’m stuck with my pretty blue and silver paperweight. I could probably kick it along to small claims court, but to be honest, I’m running out of motivational steam. The time & effort it would take to argue is beginning to exceed the AU$470 purchase price. Chalk this one up to experience.

On the plus side, if I ever want to make a dramatic film-clip, I can bring my Mbox and laptop in lieu of a wind machine, so there’s some money saved perhaps. Plus if it’s a night-shoot, the crew can huddle around the laptop to keep warm.

So I’m left with a conundrum… I have all this gee-whiz-bang-industry-standard-dontcha-know Pro Tools software, and while I’m completely enamoured with REAPER, there’s still a stubborn streak in me that says “You’ve paid for Pro Tools now. You should use it”. Not on the laptop obviously (I don’t particularly fancy having to prise a heap of smouldering melted plastic off my studio table after each session) but perhaps on my old faithful studio machine.

It’s a stupid compulsion really. The software itself is clunky and bloaty – I needed to upgrade the RAM on the machine just to get it running somewhere near smoothly, and even then it didn’t match the performance of my previous software before the upgrade. Plus it neatly sucks you in to this cumulative payment system whereby you have to cough up extra dollars to unlock Digidesign’s arbitrary restrictions. I understand the need to segment the product range and retain a market for the high-end stuff, that’s just good business sense. Hell, I cut my teeth on 8-track tape, so a 32 audio track count limitation I can live with (or work around). But MP3 export, non-realtime bounce… these are universal and rudimetary features. I’d happily trade all of the “looks just like a photo of an 1176, sounds like a photocopy of a digital ass” plugins for a solid set of useful features that don’t damage my machine.

Is there a “laptop non-combustion module” upgrade available by any chance?

Anyway, I’ve been compiling a pros and cons list for persevering with Pro Tools.

PROS

• It’s the “industry standard”, and therefore worth learning
• It came with a lot of useful bundled software and plugins
• I paid for it, and dammit, I’m getting my money’s worth

CONS

• It’s the industry standard, but probably shouldn’t be, and deserves knocking off its perch
• The bundled software and plugins are absurdly limited in their functionality, and in most cases are easily surpassed by freeware and open source alternatives
• I already wasted my money – no sense also wasting my time
• I am neither insane, nor a masochist

So I’m afraid the cons have it. Pro Tools for the round-file. Thank God for that. May it never blight my door again.