Tips & Techniques:Pro Tools - Getting 96 audio tracks with Pro Tools LE

First you need the Music Production Toolkit (MPTK), which provides you with 48 stereo audio tracks. It also has unlimited aux inputs and 32 busses to work with. Digi often offers LE hardware upgrades with a half price MPTK.

Then, you can use audio tracks as normal, but if you start running out, you can cram two mono tracks into one stereo pair (just drag in the regions side by side). This is a bit awkward and has its limits, but it does work!

Each channel of the stereo pair has its own independent pan slider, and you can use the multi-mono Trim plugin (unlink it by clicking the joined rings) to set (and automate) independent volume levels. You can also use other multi-mono plugins, unlinked, with different settings for each side or one side bypassed. If those facilities aren't enough, you can use a bus send to a mono bus where you can apply other plugins (including ones that don't support multi-mono) and automation.

If you need even more audio channels, you can buy a ReWire slave DAW such as Ableton Live, have the two DAWs sync with PT as master, and use the Rewire plugin on Aux inputs to bring in the audio from Live.

[orksnork]

wow...that's a pretty neat workaround...

[peeder]

Update: mattyd has discovered that Melodyne plugin continues to play back audio on tracks whose voices have been deactivated due to running out of tracks. Therefore, using Melodyne plugin instances you should be able to run nearly unlimited audio tracks...and tune and time them nicely to boot!

[0bazooka_joe0]

Not sure if you know this but DAWs (atleast ProTools) dont actually understand "stereo." They still work in mono (hence the multi-mono plugins and the dual pan knobs on stereo tracks). So, your idea on throwing mono tracks onto stereo tracks to free up tracks doesn't work. ProTools still recognizes a stereo track as two voices... and there for (even with the music production toolkit) will still only allow for 48 voices. sorry bud.