Pro Tools Express Mbox

BOTTOM LINE UP FRONT: This product is perfect for the working, DIY musician who wants a professional setup but without breaking the bank or ever setting foot in a real studio. (13 FEB 2014 Update: Last year this product was twice as expensive, so you should buy it now!)I purchased this product because I wanted to build a small-scale, portable, and semi-professional home studio. Pro Tools Express gives you all the bells & whistles the full version has, only you are limited to 16 audio tracks. For a home studio, this is more than enough. Since you'll be recording and working with Pro Tools, you can quite easily export your projects to another Pro Tools equipped studio if you want to get heavy duty mastering treatment later on... that is perhaps one of the biggest reasons to use Pro Tools at home, because whether you are amateur or professional, you have that flexibility to upscale if you're suddenly signed to a record label and they want to remaster your music. I'll give additional commentary based on what kind of musician you are:1. FOLK SINGER-SONGWRITER --> You will love the ability to track your instrument and vocals simultaneously. With some additional external gear, you could even make a portable rig such that you could record each live gig to give your fans plenty of music. An acquaintance of mine recently went on Kickstarter to ask for a lot of money to record a half-hour EP of nothing but ukelele, guitar, and voice... and I tried talking him out of it... because he could've went the DIY route for way, way less and done the same thing and wouldn't have regretted it, even if he had to pay an audio engineer freelancer a good fee just to record for him.2. SOLO POP ARTIST/VOCALIST --> This product can be your sketchbook, since you'll have the flexibility to scratch record songs and then ramp up the mixing and mastering later on. This saves time and money in professional studios, and will help you get your songs completed way faster. If you're a vocalist, you can just focus on using this product to record your vocals at home. Same for other instruments. You can tailor your home studio setup to be a specialized single-instrument recording environment.3. LOCAL ROCK BAND --> You'll only have two mics to work with, but you can get a really good drum sound with 2 mics. It is also possible to get some additional external gear if your drummer wants to do a full 6-mic treatment on his kit, because you can route all the inputs to a mixer and then send the mixer's L/R stereo output to the Mbox. It's a little more work upfront, but entirely doable if you want to get a better drum sound. Once drums are recorded, you can do guitars, bass, and vocals separately until your song is finished. Even if you don't want to or can't do drums at home, recording guitars, bass, and vocals independently and then transferring all your files to a professional studio for mixing and tracking drums is what many bands do anyway. It doesn't take a professional audio engineer to stick an SM57 in front of a guitar cab. DO IT YOURSELF.4. SOLO HARD ROCK/HEAVY METAL ARTIST --> With the ability to get even an amazing drum sound with Superior Drummer or EZDrummer, you can quite literally do everything yourself with an extremely minimal setup. The Mbox is all you need, if you can't afford to get the Mbox Pro.5. PROSPECTIVE PROFESSIONAL HOME STUDIO ENGINEER --> I would not recommend this product simply because the limited inputs for the Mbox will restrict your ability to record all types of clients. The Mbox Pro would be a better purchase, or rather the HD-series of products, which are rackmountable if you want to go that route. It really depends on your desire for portability and scale of recording requirements. That being said, the Mbox Pro might be more suitable for you if you are a serious musician, in a band, and wants an accessible DIY option that requires a good investment in gear, but won't completely break the bank. Additionally, with other products from Toontrack such as EZMix 2, you could quite literally make your home studio into a legit side-gig with the quality of Toontrack software available, such that you can do everything in one room.

The unit itself is solid and well built, all the knobs and switches have a very high quality feel to them, especially the monitor output volume knob. I keep it just to the right of my mouse, so I can reach over and make drastic or minute adjustments as easy as can be. The reason I got this unit was because the other interfaces I've used which didn't have balanced outputs caused an unbearable high pitched whine in my sensitive studio monitors. You could literally hear the CPU and hard drive activity of my computer through them. With the balanced outputs of this unit, that problem is completely alleviated. Dead silence when I turn the volume down.However, it's not perfect. Occasionaly, it will cut out on me, especially when switching between several different applications that are all playing (or are capable of playing) sounds, and won't work again unless I unplug the USB cable, wait a few seconds, and plug it back in. You'd think this would be a deal breaker, but honestly, I've never owned a pro audio interface that didn't do this. Seriously, Echo Audio's Mona with a PCI interface, Stanton ScratchAmp 2 with firewire, Focusrite USB, ProjectMix IO, and this unit have ALL done this to me. And this is on multiple different PCs, different OSes, different everything. And I'm no PC noob, either... I've been a Systems Administrator for over 15 years. I'm highly suspicious that Windows' audio system just isn't designed to deal with multiple multi-channel interfaces well at all. Hey, at least it's better than PulseAudio under Linux. Good luck getting that one to cooperate.Overall, I'd recommend it.

I am in love with the mbox 3! I owned and mbox 2 and an mbox 2 mini, both great by the way, and this one is another home run by avid! Fir the price you get a top quality device! That gives you ultra professional results! It runs smoothly on my mac and also on a PC, the pres are smooth and give a nice warm color to your sound! Midi runs better than ever, no hickups whatsoever! It has a 20db pad for when your signal is too hot, 48v phantom power, but what made buy was the DSP, which makes a huge difference compare to my old mbox 2 mini, it makes your monitoring better, you get much more control of your takes, and also helps your computer run better! There are a ton of great interfaces out there but for the price the mbox 3 is simply unbeatable,, it comes with protools express which is great but i use it with protools 8 because i need the 48 tracks, and express is only 16 tracks. I recommend 100% inhave been using digidesign/avid products for over 10 yrs with zero complains! Had the 1st mbox which i loved, and avery mbox ever since.

The installation instructions are terrible, I had to go to the forums to get useful information. After a painful process just to set up the anti-piracy software, I found out that my operating system version was "too new", and I would have to wait for an update. The update came, but once again my operating system version was "too new". According to their customer support, only Mac OS X 10.8.3 (Mountain Lion) is supported. Customer support suggested that I downgrade my operating system, which is not an acceptable option for me. What's more, this tells me that, even if they come up with a newer version that supports my current operating system, there is no guarantee that, if I install an OS update, that Pro Tools Express will continue working.

Well I recently bought this with an MXL R144 Ribbon mic hoping to invest in a basic studio set up. Anyways this product works decent up until the installation process. Maybe it's not the software itself probably the fact that windows 8 is shit and nothing is fully compatible with it. "Error occurred while trying to load the controller personality "MBox 3." If any of you solve this solution let me know please.