Pro Tools Live

I just watched James’ Live Pro Tools Playback Rig on Pro Tools Expert, mainly because I was curious to learn what advantages he found with Pro Tools over Ableton Live (which I’ve written about previously).

He uses four outputs from an Audient iD22 to drive:

  • Stereo mains
  • Bass to the PA
  • Click track to his in-ears

He sets their gig up as a linear show, and effectively just presses play. He has memory markers he can use to jump around in the set, in case they decide to change something on the fly.

The biggest tips he offers are:

  1. Set the buffer size to the maximum supported; since he’s not recording anything, the latency doesn’t matter and this increases stability.
  2. Remove unneeded plugins from the machine.

But what are the advantages over Ableton Live? He addresses this at the end of the video:

The thing that most people say is “Why don’t you use Ableton Live, Live?”, and there’s a really simple answer: I don’t know it as well as I know Pro Tools.

That seems completely reasonable, and I’ll be sticking with Ableton.