MAX GUTNIK: My name is Max Gutnik. I'm the marketing manager of professional products for Digidesign, and we're here talking about Pro Tools 8, the most advanced audio creation and music production software ever.

So Pro Tools 8 overview, we start with a brand new graphical user interface which we start with higher contrast for better viewability and less eye fatiguel; as we know, Pro Tools users spend a lot of time looking at that screen, and all the things you know and love about Pro Tools is still where you'd expect them to be but there's lots of enhancements and customizations and efficiency so that you can do your work faster and more intuitively.

There's some great new content that we've added to Pro Tools 8. We have over 30 new plugins that come included with Pro Tools 8 and five new virtual instruments starting with Xpand 2, we have Boom (a new drum machine), Vacuum (a tube synthesizer), we have DB33 which is an amazing drawbar organ, and Mini Grand (a great sounding grand piano virtual instrument), all made by our AIR group.

Aside from that, there's a lot of new great editing and MIDI capabilities in Pro Tools 8. There's a new MIDI edit window and there's a scoring feature in Pro Tools 8 so you can now do notation and you can edit notation and there's new automation lanes right in the edit window so you can now see all your automation right inside the edit window, and you have a new track comping feature to allow you to do playlists and promote various multi-takes into one great comp. We have elastic pitch as part of our elastic time feature that allows you to plus or minus four octaves in cents or semitones as intuitively as elastic time, which is everybody's favorite [SOUNDS LIKE] time and space stretch point.

Additionally, we have some great things in Pro Tools LE. Pro Tools LE now comes with three times the track out from 16 mono track or 16 stereo tracks to 48 stereo tracks. The new music production tool kit takes that up to 64 tracks, and is available for $100 less. And finally, the complete production toolkit is 128 tracks and it features 7.1 surround capabilities, so we're really proud of the LE stuff.

There's also Satellite Link. Satellite Link is an Ethernet protocol that allows you to connect five Pro Tools systems together via Ethernet and control the transport of any one of those systems at once, so that's great for film guys and multi Pro Tools session work. There's also video satellite which we're showing here, which allows you to do Avid Video in high definition along with Pro Tools and just integrate it into your workflow without using any of your Pro Tools processing or resources.

And I think that's about it. I think that covers Pro Tools 8.