That was the backbone of their sales pitch indeed: guaranteed I/Os (native based DAWs were reliant on the host).

The "standard" which everyone implies PT to be now (last 10 years let's say) is based on the DAW - it's just the DAW you will find most frequently in commercial studios around the world (even in Bali). Wherever I've recorded (in Australia, Bali, China, France, Boston, NY, L.A., Miami, etc), Pro Tools was there - even if I recorded on tape, it was then dumped into PT and massaged there.

The "standard" means that after the session was massaged, it could be sent to any mixing engineer anywhere in the world - as is - no questions asked. You send the PT session, and you get back a mix. Because every mixing engineer worth their salt uses Pro Tools.

The "standard" has nothing to do with track count or DSP now. That's millennial era mentality. Gen Z mentality is all G/UIx and shortcuts based. Ask any video editor, or photographer what the "standard" is in their industry. One product's name will dominate.

Last but not least, and I've said this before in this forum, and in this thread a day or two ago: we all get paid by a client. Sometimes the client is the artist (what we call "legacy projects"), but most often it's a label, or a studio (and increasingly, a video game company).

What this means is that they're getting projects from composers and producers and artists from all over the world. I can guarantee you that Fruity Loops projects or sessions or whatever they're called are rejected on the spot. Professionals have no time for this. Everyone expects Pro Tools sessions. That's what "standard" means - not DSP, not I/O counts: expectations.

If I'm not mistaken, Netflix was the first to institutionalize Avid for ALL their projects (film and audio and music), meaning Media Composer and Pro Tools only for film editors, dialogue, FX, and composers. I was once told by an Avid VP that they consider Netflix their biggest client because everyone in the film and audio industry doing business with Netflix has had to buy PT rigs, to deliver as per the terms of the contracts they signed.

PT is like English: not everyone speaks it natively, and Mandarin is indubitably the most "popular" language worldwide, but when you factor in 700M Europeans, 1.4B Indians, and nearly half of Africa, English is clearly the lingua franca - and so is Pro Tools in our A/V industries. Anyone failing to comprehend that is stuck in a digital island of their own fixed mindset making.

ps - I have never bought or used PT myself (only Logic Pro, Soundscape, and DSP-Quattro), I'm just relaying experience and observations.

 

Last edited: Jan 9, 2026 at 1:08 AM

In the country where I live, sound engineers are trained on Steinberg - Cubase & macOS.

 

Cubase is for sure very popular in Europe, and the chart of google searches shows it was the most popular at some point in the past globally.

Honestly, I don't care about pro. mixing engineers, they are a very small part of musical world that is becoming obsolete and replaced with gear becoming cheaper, free know-how knowledge, even AI mixing tools nowadays. Recently someone posted a short documentary about how studios are dying specifically in L.A. The original point was about DAW's popularity overall. IRL I know only few people that use PT, what I see online from famous producers I follow and like is also not PT.

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/reason/comments/1q7c9u8/rumor_50_of_reason_staff_has_been_let_go/

Rumor: 50% of Reason staff has been let go


I only heard this from a friend, but I live and work in Stockholm and have quite a few ex-reasoners as friends. It seems they let everybody but devs and techs go. Support, Q&A, management, HR, finance, almost all let go.

Seems quite normal for a business you're about to fold into your own. Keep crucial devs for 6-12 months for handover and not risking losing any important code/process.

My guess is they will close the Stockholm office within a year or two, and completely fold the rest into LANDR main operation in Canada.

 

I 100% agree!
It is sad we have nothing like blender. Yes there's ardour, I buy a supporter version every now and then, but to be honest I don't really like working with it.

 

There were many free hosts over the years, but they weren't as good as commercial ones, I remember trying even a free Logic clone for Windows, xd. Blender is interesting, it was funded initially by donations when open sourcing and later on both big companies and its users are supporting it. It ironically has bigger full time staff than many DAW companies.

 

What are large language models (LLMs)?
www.ibm.com/think/topics/large-language-models

 

Any AI implementation or qol updates to Reason might create some buzz here and there, but I don't believe this purchase will make a huge impact in the long run. We saw what happened with Acid Pro and others.

Also considering how AI datacenters will ruin the environment and become surveillance centers in the future, it really triggers me how most brands are relentlessly using AI word for their algorithmic, formulated stupid gimmicks in their music apps just to sell hope to lazy ppl. Most of them don't even have anything AI in them lol. What a shitty time to live in.

 

LLMs are a type of neural network that simulates the analog environment of the human brain with neural networks. LLMs don't have a defined goal other than predicting the next word in a series of words. But the complexity of the network that evolves during training becomes sophisticated enough to do complex tasks. They are trained by propagating the correct result back up the chain of the network, strengthening those nodes. Pre-training is done on just plain shoving in vast amounts of text from everywhere, post-training - also called fine-tuning, is where you get humans in the loop saying whether this was a good answer or not, but the underlying model itself is still a monster of the worst human traits, but the edge that we interact with it plays nicely most of the time.