[Larry[_11_]]

I urge you to simplify the Digidesign personal studio product line.

I'm a long-time Cakewalk user, considering switching to Pro Tools. For
a "new arrival," the product positioning of your LE and M-Powered
lines is opaque and confusing. You have to search external forums to
understand that, really, there's not much difference at all, and it
has more to do with the history of your acquisitions. Not really
sensible from a customer point of view. Perhaps at first, this
bifurcated approach was a fast way to market, but I'd expect the two
product lines would merge in the following release.

Pro Tools also requires hardware for copy protection against piracy.
I'm sure you've heard plenty about the inconvenience of that
requirement. But assuming it's necessary to protect your business,
surely you could streamline the approach. I often use DAW software on
planes, where plugging in external boxes just to start the software
makes little sense. When I saw M-Powered requires an iLok key, at
first I thought that would suffice for using the software in editing
mode. But it seems you still require an external box. Why? The iLok
proves I paid for the software. Of course, LE supports the Mbox 2
Micro dongle, but charging $280 for a device mainly for your copy-
protection benefit seems excessive.

By the way, naming the peripherals for LE as Mbox, which are *not* the
ones compatible with M-Powered is mighty confusing for a new comer.
Mbox doesn't work with M-Powered? Strange.

In summary, if I were the product manager for your personal studio
line, I would combine LE and M-Powered into a single personal studio
product, and require only the iLok to authorize the software (assuming
an ongoing requirement for physical copy protection). The product line
would support both sets of peripherals.

From your web site, I see some product manager positions are open.
Perhaps I should apply. :-)

[Mike Rivers]

Larry wrote:

I'm a long-time Cakewalk user, considering switching to Pro Tools. For
a "new arrival," the product positioning of your LE and M-Powered
lines is opaque and confusing. You have to search external forums to
understand that, really, there's not much difference at all, and it
has more to do with the history of your acquisitions.

Actually, I think it has more to do with the distribution channels. More
than once I've recommended the M-Powered approach to someone looking for
low cost entry into the ProTools world only to be reminded that when
buying it as Digidesign ProTools, for approximately the same price for a
simple interface and the program, you get more bundled plug-ins in the
Digidesign version. But M-Audio offers a much wider variety of mid-range
hardware usable with ProTools. Of course there's some crossover but
Digidesign is more likely to be sold through pro audio channels while
M-Audio is more often found in music stores.

As far as using ProTools for mixing and editing on an airplane,
Digidesign has you covered with the M-Box Micro. It's essentially a
play-only dongle with a headphone jack, in the form factor of a USB
thumb drive.




--
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