Avid Everywhere—Audio Technology Preview

Independent artists and musicians often create their best work when they collaborate. For studio- and facility-based music and audio pros, collaboration is a must as the creative process becomes less centralized and projects move across multiple rooms, studios, and time zones. Of course, this poses a challenge when long distances separate you from other collaborators.

To connect you with talent and help you collaborate easier than ever before, we’re developing new cloud-based collaboration tools for Pro Tools. This will enable you and other Pro Tools users to work together on the same music session or soundtrack—in real time or offline—no matter where you all are across the world.

With built-in “community” features, you can create groups of collaborators, see who’s online and available, and send invites for one or more people to contribute to a session. Or expand your talent pool by finding other collaborators through a Pro Tools directory.

Collaborate the way you want

With track-based collaboration, you’ll be able to:

• Post sessions to cloud storage and invite others to collaborate
• Work on the same session at the same time or offline and share updates directly within Pro Tools
• Record, edit, and mix tracks that will be pushed to all other collaborators upon completion
• Automatically keep track of all contributions and changes, as files are automatically tagged with rich metadata
• Stream mixes to a mobile device for real-time review and approval
• Communicate with collaborators through text or video chat directly from within Pro Tools

Store and archive your work locally or in the cloud

There are times when you may need to revisit past projects to create a remix, repurpose session stems, or even remaster a song. To ensure that you maintain access to all parts of your project, we’re working on a new audio archival service that will enable you to store content and track it using encapsulated metadata. This technology is being designed so that assets can be accessed and played further down the line, even if technologies change or are unavailable—no matter how far out in the future you resurrect them.

You’ll be able to archive a simple stereo mix, the full session, individual stems, or even flatten all tracks so that the original plug-ins used to create them aren’t required.

In addition, we’re developing a new cloud storage service that will enable you to house archived sessions and files, plus all of the sessions, stems, and stereo mixes you make available to sell in the marketplace, making your files easily accessible from everywhere.

Content creators today face many challenges, from having the right tools and resources you need to create and deliver high-quality, compelling content, to getting the exposure you need to promote and sell your work. To help audio professionals and aspiring pros market their talent and help content creators address their music and sound needs, we’re planning to introduce a new marketplace—an interactive, online audio community that facilitates connections, creation, and commerce.

In our new marketplace, you’ll be able to…

• Publish session files, multichannel stems, and stereo mixdowns directly from Pro Tools for license in the public marketplace
• Gain exposure and opportunities to make money by connecting with media professionals looking to license music and sound assets
• Quickly find professional-quality content in the style and formats you need, as all files will contain rich, searchable metadata—whether you want a bounced-down stereo mix or a Pro Tools session with discreet tracks
• Rate and provide comments for media assets in the marketplace to help others in the community make more informed purchasing decisions
• Buy and sell music and audio content with all rights and price offerings managed for you
• Search for and purchase marketplace content and audio plug-ins directly from within Pro Tools—with no application restart required after installation

Unlike social music sites that simply allow you to share and promote your music, Avid’s marketplace is designed to help you forge more meaningful connections with the entire pro audio community, enabling you to connect with media professionals and other creators to share, collaborate, enhance, promote, and sell your work—publicly or privately. The marketplace will provide you with more career independence, putting power in your hands to make connections that were previously only available to those “on the inside” to grow your business.

Today’s consumers are dictating how, when, and where they want to enjoy media. But as more studios and facilities face an overwhelming increase in digital media assets—and an increasing reliance on collaboration across a greater number of contributors on any given project—trying to document, manage, protect, and track assets is becoming more challenging. That’s why metadata management is critical.

With reliable, comprehensive metadata, media creators and distributors can keep track of everyone who creatively contributes to a piece of content, making it easy to document who did what, when, and where. It also makes it easier to manage and control versioning and ensure that accurate credit and compensation are given. And it provides a means for consumers to find content and learn more about it. Unfortunately, there is no standard when it comes to metadata in media production—Avid wants to change that.

Track assets with a new open metadata schema

As a first step towards realizing this vision, we’re working on integrating a new open, universal metadata schema into Pro Tools that enables you to track every asset and project created in the industry-standard DAW. Our metadata schema embraces industry standards and is extendible, ensuring that nothing gets lost in transition or translation.

With our open, universal metadata schema, you can…

• Track how audio assets and projects are created and who contributed to the creation
• Facilitate the metadata communication between content creators, distributors, and retailers, including data such as album name, songwriters, release date, sales reporting, and licensing
• Monetize media assets through multiple distribution channels and by repurposing content
• Communicate the required data for distribution, usage, and rights management control
• Customize and automate workflows that connect content and commerce together

By integrating a universal metadata schema directly into the DAW most widely used across music, film, and television production, any asset can be easily tracked across the entire production and media value chain—throughout its lifecycle—using a common set of standardized definitions accepted throughout the media industry.