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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

> That's plausible but AVID Pro Tools is even more prestigious than Logic and AVID's market cap is only $250 million[0].

In no universe is Pro Tools more prestigious than any of its competition.

I think Pro Tools is viewed as The Thing That All Studio PHB Managers Purchased At Some Point So It's Reasonable For Studio Techs to Be Trained For. Kind of the "nobody ever got fired for picking IBM" of the music industry. In my opinion, AVID does not have a reputation for making innovative products. See what happened when they acquired Sibelius (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI).

My limited experience with the industry suggests that Ableton, Bitwig, and Logic are the Cool Tools for Producing Music, that Cubase (Steinberg) is particularly popular with composers, that FL Studio is the cool low-cost leader among students, and that Reason is The Outsider. Notice which software is not in this list.

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There’s also the legacy of pro tools and logic.

For many years pro tools was the only game in town for serious non-linear audio editing, and did not support midi at all.

Around the same time period Logic was the only game in town for serious midi work and didn’t support audio at all.

> My limited experience with the industry suggests that Ableton, Bitwig, and Logic are the Cool Tools for Producing Music, that Cubase (Steinberg) is particularly popular with composers, that FL Studio is the cool low-cost leader among students, and that Reason is The Outsider. Notice which software is not in this list.

I wonder where a modern tracker such as Renoise fits in. This one even works on Linux.

Pro Tools is seen as the serious tool while the other DAWs you mention are toys for electronic music producers

They're different product categories entirely these days. The other DAWs aren't "toys" and in fact do a lot of things significantly better than Pro Tools.

Pro Tools as a product only makes sense at scale, with multiple people in the workflow in different locations. Same story for Media Composer compared to other NLEs.

I know they aren't "toys" but when I tell the Ableton crowd I use Pro Tools the common response is what one of respect for using more professional tools. I know it's mostly perception at this stage however this is from people who've been releasing music and touring with large crowds.

Pro Tools has brand recognition amongst non audio engineers and inertia of older engineers who can't be bothered to switch, but no-one actually likes it. Nuendo, Sequoia and SADiE are the Serious Professional options, while Reaper enjoys a growing cult following.

I like it. All the other stuff makes the music for me. I feel way more in control on Pro Tools. I make what's in my head and not what the software funnels me into.

20 years ago maybe.

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's hardly any music that isn't electronic these days.

> I don't know if you've noticed, but there's hardly any music that isn't electronic these days.

That's true, but you can hardly say the same thing about synths, which seems to be the salient detail.

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