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Comment by Hemospectrum | Hacker News Reader

> Pro Tools doesn't get a mention in this thread, for the most part, but for better or worse it remains something of standard in audio post-production in the US. AAX isn't a bad re-imagining of what what RTAS/TDM-based plug-ins pre v10, and Avid aren't going to relinquish any control to third parties.

To everyone’s surprise (yours included, I’m sure) Avid is mentioned in the announcement as a company already involved with the project and working on using it for something. There’s a nonzero chance they could adopt it in Pro Tools and drop AAX.

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True. But Avid are largely terrible at implementing new technologies in a timely manner, especially since they started off-shoring development as more and more of the old timers went to recreate Pro Tools as Luna for Universal Audio! I mean, although a Windows version of Pro Tools is available, the core of their professional user base is on the Mac, and they haven't even managed to get an Apple Silicon-native version out the door yet -- over two years since Apple provided DTKs for that purpose. (Meanwhile, Logic Pro, Cubase, Studio One, Live, Bitwig, and others have all managed it.)

Avid is not exactly transparent and it's extremely difficult to see what their long-term plans are. We can only speculate. The most convincing theory I've heard regarding Apple Silicon is that they may need a new hardware interface to work with Macs that lack expansion slots. Developing hardware is of course a much slower process than developing software, and it may take them several more years to get such a product out the door. In the meantime, Pro Tools has limited usefulness on machines that can’t talk to the hardware it’s designed to drive, so why bother releasing a port?

That's not quite the case... HDX cards can be used on Apple Silicon with Rosetta 2 via the Avid-branded chassis from Sonnet, and I've personally not had a problem with that. Of course, some driver-level work would be required to fully support HDX natively in Apple Silicon. Also, the Carbon interface works fine on Apple Silicon under Rosetta 2 as it uses AVB. More and more, HDX is less important for DSP, although remains vital for large I/O configurations. On the other hand Pro Tools 2022.x supports Core Audio (or ASIO) hardware with more I/O. And if you're running the Dolby Renderer on the same machine as Pro Tools, for example, you have to run native audio hardware in any case, using the Pro Tools Aggregate I/O option (or any other Core Audio device). So I wouldn't say these are cases of limited usefulness; during Covid I had to do a whole movie soundtrack album that way at home, running Pro Tools on a 27-inch iMac with the Dolby Renderer. But when that 27-inch iMac (the last Intel 2020 model) can easily outperform a Mac Studio when it comes to running a full Atmos Netflix dub, you kind of feel it wouldn't hurt for Avid to kind of hurry up!

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