At the recent AES show, Digidesign was handing out postcards that promoed their new free version of Pro Tools. It's an 8 audio/48 MIDI track version of Pro Tools 5.0.1 that will run on a Mac or PC without any additional hardware. This is a cool way to get your feet wet with hard drive recording without much investment, as long as you have a relatively new and sufficiently fast enough computer to run the software. It's available for download at digidesign.com. As of our press deadline, it's still not available, but they say it will be in a few days, so check it out.

Tape Op is a bi-monthly magazine devoted to the art of record making.

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