by Vijith

Wired Magazine's recent article on what they're calling "The Good Enough Revolution" posits that technological advancement has largely outpaced consumer needs, and the name of the game is no longer upping the product specs, but rather finding the sweet spot regarding what kinds of performance compromises consumers are willing to eat in order to keep the price down. As a case study, it focuses largely on the popular low-end Flip digital video camera, which has proven quite successful with broke YouTubers despite its technical shortcomings. (Stick with the article all the way to the end and you'll even be rewarded with the theory that Predator unmanned aerial drones constitute the same phenomenon in the military, which feels totally gross.)

Even in the professional media production world, one might consider the Red camera that set the video world on fire a couple years back a sort of high-end analogue to the Flip, and a few years back there was a huge increase in the number of affordable condenser mics available to budget-conscious musicians. I am, of course, reluctant to dismiss the at-times-quite-oppressive cost of musical equipment, but at the same time, I do know that making a record is considerably cheaper now than it was twenty years ago, even if I'm not really old enough to have any perspective on that firsthand.

So now let's squish this up alongside Avid's debatably-earth-shaking announcement last week: Pro Tools has officially gone ultra-low-end with the new Essentials bundles, which hover around the $100 mark for a super-light version of the industry-leading DAW and your choice of USB peripheral -- either a condenser mic, a MIDI keyboard, or for a few bucks more, an M-Audio Fast Track interface.

Packages like this are old hat in the digital recording world by now, of course, nor is it any secret that Pro Tools has been moving toward ever since computers became powerful enough to outmode the process cards that allowed it to hit the market first and hardest in the 90's. Rather, my interest in this one was piqued largely by Create Digital Music's point that this puts genuine, legal industry-stardard audio production software -- no doubt quite capable for a beginner's needs despite the lack of multitrack recording and whatever other bells and whistles have been omitted -- in the hands of aspiring musicians for around the same price as Guitar Hero.

Not that it wasn't possible to get started for cheap before -- there's GarageBand on Macs, the free Indaba Console, and actually even Pro Tools had their old free version up through the Mac OS 9. (In fact, for years, Deerhoof used to record by syncing up three copies of that running on different machines, though that probably testifies more to their kookiness than any particular democratization of music production.) Branding and marketing matter, though, and for years Pro Tools has been getting sustained coverage in the mainstream media to a similar degree as the trendy Auto-Tune stuff has of late. To the layman, Pro Tools has come to be synonymous with audio production, Kleenex/Xerox style. Disregarding for a moment Avid's bottom line, for the sake of fostering creativity in our culture, hitting a two-digit price point with that is a very, very good thing. Or Good Enough, at least, which may be all that matters anymore.