Apple Should Buy Pro Tools
In case you don't follow the always rowdy rumor pipelines and news pages surrounding Apple, you'd be unaware that Steve Jobs and company have been doing some serious shopping. What for? Anything related to high end video.
For the past year, a year in recession it's worth pointing out, Apple has been spending some of that $4 billion in cash they have laying around (and...what, you thought Apple was going broke? Right). Jobs and company have gobbled up a handful of very high-end video software developers with the obvious intention to be a one-stop-shop for anything and everything related to pro video. Through Apple's spending and software integration, the price for professional, digital broadcast editing and production is falling. An industry that used to spend tens of thousands of dollars per workstation will soon be able to do it all for thousands less on a PowerBook.
Which leaves me wondering - why doesn't Apple buy Pro Tools?
For the non-audio crowd, Pro Tools is the Photoshop of the music world. Despite it's incredibly high price tag, and notoriously bad technical support, Pro Tools is the de facto application for audio production.
Flip through the latest special "Music Issue" edition of Wired Magazine, and you'll see pages full of PowerBooks, iBooks, and musicians name-dropping Apple at every turn. They all run, and swear by Pro Tools.
If Apple were as serious about cornering the audio market as they were about video, Apple would own the creative services industry at every conceivable level. Think about it ñ one seamless, integrated platform and software application environment where video, audio, 2-D and 3-D graphic design all mesh together. The creative convergence that could emerge from such a paradigm of mediums is mind-blowing, but very attainable. To me anyway, Pro Tools is one of the missing links.
Comments
i like your ability to make sense =|.
Posted by: circles at April 6, 2002 5:49 PM
you are dead on with this. (Or maybe i am just saying that because i have thought the same thing)
Posted by: josh at April 7, 2002 1:15 AM
if they did buy pro tools, they might be able to make cents too.
Posted by: philip likens at April 7, 2002 10:50 AM
Pro Tools is made by Digidesign, and this company is owned by Avid.
Avid makes video editing hardware/software for Mac & Windows Platforms.
Posted by: GuilleBe at April 7, 2002 12:54 PM
Not swear by, swear *at*. Pro Tools is the 800 lb gorilla, but it's not the only choice: it's more like the last remaining beast that survived the mass extinction of the 1st generation audio tools. Like any program (cf: microsoft) that accrues moss over the years, the interface is now cluttered and complex. There are much newer, nimbler apps out there that are designed from the ground up for OS X (using CoreAudio & CoreMIDI) with clearer interfaces. Emagic Logic Audio is one; so is Bias DECK; and then there are softsynths and loop programs like Propellerheads Reason and Ableton Live (Live, in particular, looks so much like an iApp Apple should buy *it*).
ProTools is the defacto standard, yes, but to get it to do anything useful requires a serious outlay in hardware (Mix Farm DSP cards and lots of rackmount interface gear). I don't see what Apple could bring to the equation to make it better, but yeah, it would be a cool thing to own ;) On the other hand, they could also take ProTools Free (or LE) and, given enough interface revving, turn that into an interesting iMusic program...those QuickTime Musical Instruments are kinda sitting around gathering virtual dust, it's time Apple created a proper interface for them ;)
Posted by: aj kandy at April 9, 2002 10:33 AM
agree with your analysis - the only problem is that protools as far as i can remember is owned by Avid - the largest competitor in the digital video production market.
They would never sell to Apple.
Posted by: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal at April 15, 2002 5:13 PM
