PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums PowerTracks Pro Audio PowerTracks Pro® Audio 2017 is Here!

The new PowerTracks® Pro Audio 2017 has arrived! There are many new features & enhancements, including :

• Music XML (notation export/import) has been enhanced. We've worked with Finale, GuitarPro, and Sibelius to enhance features and compatibility with Music XML.
• Support for time-based VSTi plugins such as EZ drummer, Jamstix, Rapid Composer, etc.
• Pitch shifting and tempo stretching has been greatly enhanced with the integration of the newest version of the world-leading Elastique 3.
• The Guitar Notation display has been enhanced. You can now enter and display guitar bends, slides, hammer-ons, and pull-offs with notation graphics indicating these elements.
  ...and more!

Visit http://www.pgmusic.com/powertracks.features.htm to learn about all the new features in PowerTracks® Pro Audio 2017.

The page is for PTPA2017, but the top of the page shows PTPA2016 features in big type. Probably want to make that change.

Fixed - thanks jford!

-Callie

It's HORRIBLE!!
This (as usual) is not really an upgrade, imo. It's a re-design for the sake of nothing, and it now takes 3x more mouse clicks to find anything and make it work. One of my pet software peeves is 'upgrades' that are little more than BAD GUI re-design. You thought you KNEW this program? Not anymore! Gee, thanks for upping my learning curve, and 'fixing' the GUI to be confusing and way worse than what it's replacing! You've buried the track menu into the edit menu... why? You've killed numeric keypad +/- up-down scrolling for patches, ports, etc. in classic tracks... it now takes 5 keystrokes instead of 1; you've stolen half my screen area for huge half-empty button panels that contain nothing I need, ("title" in huge letters, is one of the LAST things I need to know! Duh!) while disappearing stuff I use all the time... like where did the marker arrows go??? Where are the audio/midi panels buttons?

I upgraded to 17 only because of the new node/rubber-band volume control on tracks, and I was hoping that track selections would also have drag-able edges. STILL not there! That's just primitive, and so long overdue! There's a lot to hate about this useless re-design, but now let's get to a few bugs that I've noticed:

MIDI Track edit windows arbitrarily have/don't have horizontal scroll bar function. And here's a really bad one, that cost me at LEAST a day's work: Don't even think about temporarily disabling real-time effects to concentrate your computer power to the task of a multi-channel audio recording! (I do 8 tracks at once) When you're ready to re-enable them, you'll find all your carefully adjusted real-time effects have DISAPPEARED!!! SERIOUSLY?? "Disable" actually means "DELETE!" How 'bout putting that in "tips?" Along with a disclaimer: "By clicking here you understand and agree that PG Music will not reimburse you for your many hours of lost hard work, even though the blame lies 100% with us." It reminds me of the laughable version 10, where touching the master fader re-sets ALL track faders to match it! THANKS. Hours of mixing work just GONE!

I've been using PT since it was a DOS-only program, based in Hamilton, On. I've upgraded often during the decades, and I've been a big fan, up until now. I'm still new to v.17, but I've already had enough. It's making my work harder and slower, not faster and easier, and as such, gets my endorsement as a downgrade. When building 'upgrades,' you guys have to keep only ONE criteria front & center: does it require fewer or more mouse-clicks/key-strokes than before? If the answer is more, then it qualifies as a downgrade. I'm a fast power user; any extra clicks or strokes just add aggravation and time to my work. Even 1 extra second is deadly; times several hundred clicks in a day easily adds up to lost HOURS, so how is that an improvement? Version 13 isn't bad, but still the best, quickest, and easiest to use that I have is version 8, my go-to for full-featured no-bs production. No fancy graphical interface.. I can actually read the labels... and my computer isn't struggling to display a lot of window-dressing.

With that in mind, I'm curious about version 9, which I skipped. It may be the version that suits me best, and I'd like to try it, and I'll gladly pay for it. Can you please arrange for me to download it? Thank-you in advance.

Overall, it's pretty obvious that PG is not that interested in PT anymore... it's actually buried on the website, which is all about BB, and all its accessories. But many of us ACTUAL MUSICIANS don't need an "insta-band" program, or use loops to create music... pro users like me just need a good, STABLE, full-featured sequencer that doesn't work against us. You at PG should be paying much more attention to PT; in my opinion, it is (or SHOULD be) your flagship software, not the consumer/non-musician oriented band-in-a-box. I've never seen PT get any cred in the music production biz... (go figure... I've been promoting its virtues all along), and that deserves to change, but it won't until you guys get it right, promote it more, and get with the pro market, for whom workflow and efficiency is paramount. This version doesn't get it right at all, and PT's obscurity in the recording community will only deepen, as users like me see finally abandoning it as the only option.
Give me back my lost effects! :-(

Imre,

Welcome to the forums.

I take it that you are not aware of PG Music's 30-day money-back guarantee. I'm not an employee of PG Music but I do know that if, for whatever reason, the software you buy doesn't suit you, you simply need to contact the sales staff and ask for a refund within the 30 day period from purchase.

Fortunately with Powertracks, it's very easy to reinstall and run the previous version that suited you best.

All the best,
Noel

• my latest song : This Road
• my previous song 1 : That's What I Believe
• my previous song 2 (a co-write with J&B): I Won Life's Lotto
• my previous song 3 : Tomorrow I'll Be Fine

I could only get PT 2017 to downdate to PT10 as the PT9 update didn't work with the PTSEQ32.dll version.
http://www.pgmusic.com/support_windows_pt.htm#10-3

It depends on how you use PowerTracks, but you might be better making the big jump of learning a new DAW like REAPER that you can customize more if you are not happy with PT.
Or, there's another option of using ReWireVST with PT ???
http://www.pgmusic.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=371691

One improvement that would be welcome by many a users would be removing channel 10 as a set drum track. In the 90's when midi started, it was applicable, but today given that advent of where VST has gone it is just a lost track when you hit 10 in your second and third VST set up, and it becomes annoying after a while to lose a channel.

Removing channel 10 means that anyone using a GM sound source would get no percussion. It is still part of the MIDI spec.