Pro Tools
Pro Tools is the industry-standard DAW for end-to-end music production, audio post and immersive mixing. It provides a complete environment for recording, editing and mixing, with native support for Dolby Atmos, including an integrated renderer that lets engineers monitor and switch between multi-speaker and binaural headphone playback without roundtripping to an external renderer, alongside Ambisonics up to 7th order, MPEG-H, Audio Vivid and Sony 360 Reality Audio. Immersive track widths go up to 9.1.6, and the free MPEG-H Renderer plugin from Fraunhofer IIS is bundled at no extra cost for broadcast delivery. Pro Tools Studio and Ultimate editions include immersive mixing workflows, while the free Intro tier covers stereo and basic multi-track work. The latest release adds MPEG-H broadcast delivery and Dolby Headphone Personalisation, which uses a custom-measured head-related transfer function for more accurate Atmos headphone mixing, alongside a new Immersive Panner currently limited to MPEG-H and Audio Vivid renderer objects.
tech specs
history
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Pro Tools began life at Digidesign, founded in 1984 by Peter Gotcher and Evan Brooks in Menlo Park, California, originally as a company selling EPROM chips for drum machines before moving into digital audio tools. The company launched Sound Tools in 1989, a Mac-based two-track digital recording and editing system, before releasing the first version of Pro Tools in June 1991 as a four-channel multitrack system priced at around $6,000. Avid Technology acquired Digidesign in 1995, and the Digidesign brand was eventually retired in favour of Avid Pro Tools in 2010. Immersive and spatial audio workflows arrived much later: Pro Tools 2023.6 added wider immersive track formats up to 9.1.6 and extended Ambisonics support up to 7th order, Pro Tools 2023.12 introduced the integrated Dolby Atmos renderer free to Studio and Ultimate users, and Pro Tools 2026.4 added native MPEG-H support alongside Dolby Headphone Personalisation.
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