[Brendan Williams]

Hey all,

See this thread’s been up a while but I figured I’d chime in anyway. I have been using an Audiofile since 2005. I work with Louis Mills, who was mentioned in a previous post by Ty. We started with the old “spectra” mainframe and 2 unit, and then upgraded to the SC-X in 2009. Very soon, we will be abandoning our AMS system entirely and replacing our entire setup with a Pro Tools system.

What can I say? To be fair, it’s still probably the fastest dialog editor out there. It’s control surface and user interface is uniquely well suited to that particular task, and I fear that I may never be as fast on a Pro Tools system. Close someday soon perhaps, but never “as fast”.

Having said that, it’s highly unstable (breaks down constantly…con-stant-ly), has no third party plug in support to speak of, has poor system intercompatbility (it’s more or less a technological dead end), and no customer or tech support(zero, nada, zilch) on the North American continent. What’s more, the customer support from the UK is, to put it kindly…less than stellar.

Pro Tools is a better fit for working with our video suites, has a ton of highly useful plug ins, a huge community of users, and–though I certainly have no delusions of technological perfection–much more stable in general than the Audiofile (and if you’re a Pro Tools user who’d beg to differ with me on this point, I challenge you to visit our studio for a week to see if your mind doesn’t change).

There are a number of other advantages that I won’t list here, but on the whole, Pro Tools (and it’s ilk) has much more going for it than our sputtering, cantakerous, but fast (when it’s working) Audiofile.