François: Yes. And I'm really glad you're giving us this opportunity to explain what the journey has been because it's been a tough one for the development teams and us in product management. So yes, you're absolutely right.

The original intent was to release Pro Tools 2019 at NAMM and we tried our hardest to make that happen but we quickly realised in the month of January that some of the things that are part of this release are pretty deep in Pro Tools and specifically this feature that we referred to as non-stop playback or continuous playback. For all Pro Tools users out there, you all know this, whether you're running Pro Tools natively or whether you're running Pro Tools with HDX, if the transport is running and you do anything in Pro Tools, you had a track, you had a plug in, you create new tracks, you delete tracks, it will create a pause in the Transport or create some sort of audio glitch and we felt it was time to really sort of renovate that part of Pro Tools so that Pro Tools will feel nimble, that it doesn't have this glitching or this pausing of the playback, when you do things as the transport is running.

For many people it's become something they got used to, it’s not that big of a deal but it really breaks your flow. It really breaks your creative flow and we really wanted to fix that. So, we embarked on that probably at the middle point last year, working on this feature and it deals with some of the basic fundamentals of our Pro Tools reads and writes audio. So, it ended up being a lot deeper than we thought. Also, we tried to make it as ambitious as possible, so that as many things you do in Pro Tools would not impact playback at all.

In January in the ramp up to NAMM, as we were doing this, we realised that we wouldn't be ready. There were still too many bugs too many things that we need to fix. We made a decision, because we felt pretty confident at the time, that the release would happen within about four weeks of NAMM and all indicators were pointing in that direction.

We basically said okay we're going to preview it at NAMM, I think it's important that we show a number of things, this, [non-stop playback or continuous playback], which we think is a pretty significant upgrade to Pro Tools. We added more MIDI tracks, so you can now have up to 1024 tracks, we also wanted to showcase our voice count increase on the HDX and obviously we'll have Mojave support, which has been a big request from that from the marketplace. We wanted to show it to let people know that it was coming.

We were definitely aiming to release this by March and obviously now March has come and gone. I'm obviously looking at the Internet and I see folks on forums. I've seen some good April Fools about Pro Tools being released.

Mike: Which on this occasion, not guilty, we directed our April Fools in a different direction this year.

François: I mean it's only fair game and I know there's a lot of anticipation out there we had said something would come out and we were actually really on track, everything was looking good for a 2019.3 release at this point, but we encountered a new issue and that's the one that is putting us back quite significantly and unfortunately our users will have to wait another month to see this upgrade of Pro Tools.

Mike: What's the issue that slowed things up this time.

François: Interestingly enough it did not show in the early testing and we don't really have a good explanation why, but this issue bubbled up over the past two to three weeks where our beta testers were reporting more streaming errors and those two types of streaming errors and Pro Tools one of them is pretty benign. You get an error and you can keep working, you stop, you restart, everything's fine but there is another one which basically is a streaming error at the hardware level at the HDX level. I should have mentioned that from the start. This is an issue that we've identified on HDX only. And I thought, where does this steaming error come from? And interestingly enough it's in few cases, as far as we can tell it's only in 15% of cases of our users and sort of the number of cards that they have.

Mike: Would it be fair to say that the problems are across the board or only when sessions get heavy.

François: I think that the fundamental problem is actually across the board. But it does exhibit itself on the sessions that are a little bit more complex and we've identified that it's directly linked to the new firmware that we've created on that flashed directly onto the HDX cards.

Mike: So presumably that that's the HD driver that we often have to install when a new version of Pro Tools comes on, that kind of does all of that in the background?

François: Exactly. It tells you what needs to be updated and it actually flashes a chip on the card itself with new software and this included obviously the expanded voice count. We were pretty confident that we could achieve 384 four voices per HDX card and that's what we coded in. And we also had a few optimisations that we put in there that were at Apple's sort of suggestion. They said oh it might work better if you guys do this. We did all this, and everything was running fine and then as I mentioned, like in 85% of cases, no problem, everybody was getting 384 voices out of an HDX 1 system. And actually, this new version of Pro Tools seemed to be even more stable with more bugs fixes from any release we put out in 2018, so a really solid release except for this one problem. And we did some extra testing, we tried to figure out where does it come from, so we identified it as the firmware, like is it card specific and we can't really tell. So, there's just like 15% of the time, we have this issue and obviously there's thousands of HDX cards out there and 15% is not an acceptable number for us to release it as it is now.

Mike: I described this increase in the voices on the HDX systems, as trying to fit a quart into a pint pot, in the sense that up until now the whole HDX system, and TDM before it, was all based around time division multiplexing, dividing slots up into, in this case 256 slots, and that gives us the voice count or the maximum number of audio tracks that you can work with at any one time and that was how the architecture was structured for 256 slots and so presumably the challenge was to effectively get the hardware and the architecture to now function with 384 slots.

François: Yeah. So it's interesting because I did actually have that conversation with our head of engineering and it seems that architecturally speaking we're actually okay, like it seems like because we have a couple of FPGAs is on the HDX cards and there is a link between them and it's the optimisation of this link that would allow us to increase the number of audio streams effectively that we can deal with on a given card. So, it's all about optimisation to get the extra voices. But yes, you know you've got a certain architecture that's been devised for a particular use case and we're trying to squeeze more out of it, so of course there is some risk inherent to that and we're basically seeing it now as it's been tested in the field.

Mike: Am I right in saying that the next release in about a month's time will actually provide additional voices so the 384 voices will be available with this next release, the first release of 2019, will have 384 voices for standalone Ultimate software and Ultimate software with the HD Native card?

François: Yeah that's correct. We've made that decision. So as we looked at this issue and decided on a course of action, because we have a lot of goodness in this Pro Tools release and we really wanted to get it out to the world as soon as possible. There's definitely a lot of things that will first of all enable people that have new Macs and have Mojave and need to run Pro Tools on it. So that's a big deal and also getting this non-stop playback functionality as well as some of the other bits and pieces that we've put into this release. So what we decided to do is to forego the current new firmware flashing on the HDX cards, which would have yielded more voices and we're going to tweak the existing firmware and test and that's why we need a few weeks because we need to test it thoroughly and make sure that HDX still performs like we wanted to perform.

So HDX is not going to see a voice count increase in this next release, which we expect to be in the first week of May, so it will be 2019.5. However, everything else that we published as far as functionality is going to be included. As you said, it means that Pro Tools Ultimate standalone and Pro Tools Ultimate running with HD Native will start at 384 voices and then you'll be able to add some voice packs, of 128 voices, if you need to go all the way up to 768. And one of the reasons that we decided to do this is a big request from our users saying, hey we sometimes we have this massive session that we've created in the studio with HDX but we need to do some tweaks or we need to monitor it in stereo and do some editing in a smaller room, that's just running HD Native or even just running Ultimate in the standalone fashion and we want to be able to open that same session. So that's the key.

Mike: Yeah absolutely. I was talking with a high-end dubbing mixer, only a couple of weeks ago at AES in Dublin and he was really interested in the voice count increase. One of his concerns is the challenge that you've done a project with an HDX 3 system so effectively the maximum 768 voices and then there's a tweak needed, as so often is the case, and you can't get back into that room with the HDX3 system, to be able to open that project and session up on a standalone system or a system, as you say with HD native, to be able to open that, make those tweaks and then save it would be a really really good option to be able to have so that we're not tied to having to open a big project only on an HDX system. So no that is really really good news.

François: Yeah and you know we went out to market and said hey we're going to give you 384 voices as part of the basic package of Ultimate and we wanted to stand by that. It will address most workflows, by the way I think most people that use Ultimate will be fine with 384 voices and for these specific cases in which you have to get a bigger session and open it and work on it, you will have the ability, very cost effectively, to go up to that number of voices.

Mike: And with regard to HDX, it's going to be take you a little bit longer to hopefully bottom out the issues and then HDX to be able to offer 384 voices for an HDX1 through to 1152 voices for an HDX3, that will come hopefully in due course?

François: I think hopefully it is the term. That is absolutely the course of action we're taking. So, we've already started work on figuring out what the issue is and eliminating those 15% streaming errors and our goal is to provide 384 voices per HDX card and giving you all the way up to 1152 [voices on an HDX3 system]. Now there is still a slight sliver of uncertainty from our engineering department. I am pretty confident it feels to me like we are going to achieve this, but my engineering director is basically saying don't say it's going to happen because I want to leave no stone unturned. So, over the course of the next couple of months I think we'll have better visibility on what will happen but that's definitely our objective.

Mike: Great. I noticed when we were covering the new Swedish tech start-up Session, that you were on the photographs with the crew from ABBA and the other team behind Session and of course what we heard in that news story was the intent that Avid will be able to support this sort of additional metadata in Pro Tools. Now of course the story was largely about Session, but of course refers to the feature being built into Pro Tools. Could you perhaps expand on how you plan to implement the Pro Tools side of this feature so that metadata based on musicians who've played on the track, whose mixed it, all that metadata, which if fed through the system means that those people can receive the appropriate payments. How will it show itself in Pro Tools?