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Pro Tools is a software package for professional sound and digital audio editing, first created under the name Sound Tools by Digidesign, now a division of Avid. It is widely used in the post production, music, and radio industries, and serves as the de facto standard in some segments of those industries.
As one of the first programs to provide CD-quality (16-bit and 44.1 kHz) multitrack editing on a personal computer, Pro Tools quickly grew into a widely-used program in the sound recording field. It became popular in the early 1990s primarily because it offered an interface modelled after the analog hardware to which most producers were accustomed, in addition to digital technology such as plugins, effects, MIDI functionality, and advanced non-linear audio editing capabilities.
Pro Tools "systems", generally fall into three categories, depending on the needs and budget of potential users. The professional-level systems (dubbed TDM or HD) use expensive hardware which perform all audio processing on their built-in DSP (digital signal processing) chips instead of burdening the host PC. Consumer-level systems (such as the 001, 002, 002/R, and MBox) perform all processing on the host CPU and therefore have limited track counts (32 in LE vs. 192 in HD), fewer internal routing options, and a more basic version of the software itself (called Pro Tools LE, or Limited Edition). "Pro Tools Free" was released as an entry-level application and is the only version of Pro Tools that does not require Digidesign hardware to run. It is limited to only 8 audio tracks and runs on Windows 98 and Mac OS 9 only.
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