Digidesign Pro Tools LE

Software and hardware to make your music happen

Pro Tools LE is the music-playing public’s golden key into the professional studio. More than any other piece of music production software widely available to the day-job-working home studio owner it gives you valuable tools to use for professional-level productions. The reason for this is simple: Digidesign made it happen that way. Digidesign has ensured that it has all the features and tools that a music engineer or producer needs. In nearly every production studio and mixing house across the nation, you can walk in with your LE-forged audio tracks and they will be able to read, write, mix, remix, and produce your music files with no hassle.

You can argue until you’re blue in the face about different flavors, philosophies, and formats versus Pro Tools, but just as the CD still rules the sales charts with MP3, LP, SACD, DVD Audio, and cassette collectively playing a very-second fiddle, Pro Tools is the standard. And that makes Pro Tools LE a very attractive part of your home or project studio setup. Digidesign makes it a cinch to get your own Pro Tools LE system by purchasing an Mbox, Digi 002, or Digi 002R. Today, we’ll look in on the LE world through the lens of the Mbox.

Do the Mbox rock

There’s no easier way to get into Pro Tools than the Mbox. With it you can get your feet wet in a hurry producing your own audio and MIDI tracks and mixing in the full-featured Pro Tools environment. Digidesign keeps the Mbox priced extremely competitively and usually sweetens the pot with a number of very useful plug-ins and extras that add to its functional and financial value. It’s also very small, so you don’t have to worry about your desk space suddenly shrinking to the size of a postage stamp. Got a laptop? That’s even better. The two-channel Mbox is bus-powered through a single USB cable, so it’s as portable as you need it to be.

Thanks to hardworking, outside-the-box-thinking Digidesign engineers, you don’t miss out on any quality features by choosing a small interface. For starters, you get two high-fidelity, musical-sounding Focusrite mic preamps with 48-volt phantom power that let you use nice studio-quality condenser mics for voices and acoustic instruments. Those choice preamps are mated up to two channels of premium 24-bit A/D/A (analog/digital/analog) conversion at either 44.1kHz or 48kHz. Both channels on the Mbox boast more than 100 decibels of dynamic range so your guitar, vocals, or other instruments will be faithfully represented without having to perform any complicated digital acrobatics. Plus it’s friendly-looking and easy to use&a very non-intimidating piece of gear with enough muscle to get stuff done.

Hooking up the Mbox to a PC or Mac is child’s play. Digidesign includes a USB cable for hooking up the Mbox, and it’s plenty long enough for running off the top of a desk to the back of a CPU placed on the floor. I connected the Mbox to a Digi-approved PC running Windows XP with a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 processor and a gig of RAM. I breezed through the installer program, and after the mandatory restart and punching in the serial number, I was ready to start recording. Trust me, if you’ve ever installed a scanner or printer, you can handle the Mbox. It only took about five or six minutes.

Power up with Pro Tools

Just to prove how easy it is to record a track with Pro Tools LE, I’m going to walk through a quick-and-dirty tracking session to cover most of the steps you’ll have to take. First, you have to have something to record. Grab that old SM57 and your acoustic guitar, set up the microphone, plug it into one of the inputs on the Mbox, and get ready to 12-bar blues your brains out. There’s a little source selector switch on the front of the Mbox above the input gain knob; just set that to mic. Plug in your headphones, play a little, and get the level set with the input gain knob. Your hardware is now ready.

Shift over to the computer, click open Pro Tools LE, Go to File > New Session, name the session, and hit Save. Now go to File > New Track. You will be asked how many tracks and what kind. Just create one new mono audio track and hit Create. There, you’ve just created your first Pro Tools session, and have a brand-spanking-new track to record to. With the exception of the Edit window, which we’re not going to mess with, Pro Tools should feel pretty familiar to anyone who’s used a portable or standalone multitracker before. The Mix window looks suspiciously like a mixer, and the Transport window works almost exactly like the transport controls on a four-track.

In the Mix window (Window > Show Mix) set the input of your audio track to In 1. You do this in the first of the small rectangular boxes that appear as you scan down the channel from the top to the bottom. Go back over to your guitar/mic setup and play a little more, this time watching the level meter on the channel strip in the mixer window. Adjust the level&using the slider&as desired. At this point, all you really have to do for rough-and-tumble audio is put on your headphones, go to the Transport window (Window > Show Transport), hit record, then hit play, and you’re tracking, baby. The Mbox and Pro Tools LE are faithfully digitizing whatever signal you’re feeding them and recording it as pristine tracks of clear, clean audio. To add more tracks, simply repeat as necessary.

If you’ve got cold feet right now, shame on you. That’s only three paragraphs of very simple instruction; probably less complicated than using that fancy tax assessment software you tried out last year or the manual you ground your way through trying to use a four-track for the first time. You can’t take your taxes or your four-track cassette into a studio, but Pro Tools LE can waltz right in, which clearly makes you the winner here. Now your demos and tracks can get the full benefits of recording with Pro Tools right on your home computer and get the master-level treatment when you take them to a professional studio.

Features & Specs