In a move designed to expand the power and flexibility of its UAD Powered Plug-Ins platform, Universal Audio (UA) today announced that it is an Avid RTAS developer, and that the UAD-2 platform is now compatible with Avid's family of Pro Tools music creation and audio production solutions.

"Pro Tools has been the hands-down industry leader in audio production for more than a decade," commented Universal Audio Inc founder and Chairman Bill Putnam Jr. "We're extremely pleased to have reached an agreement in which UAD plug-ins will integrate with a full range of Pro Tools software and hardware systems, including the newly announced version of Pro Tools, as well as Pro Tools|HD Native."

While a significant percentage of the 40,000 UAD Powered Plug-In users worldwide are already using Pro Tools solutions, with this agreement, these users will be assured of an improved workflow in the future.

In particular, by combining the new Pro Tools|HD Native PCIe card and UAD-2 DSP Accelerator PCIe cards, Pro Tools|HD Native users can have the best of both worlds: an "industry leading" digital editing and mixing platform working on the power of the host CPU, and a library of classic analog emulation plug-ins developed in partnership with Neve, Manley, Roland, Empirical Labs, Fairchild, Pultec, Teletronix, dbx, Studer, Lexicon and more.

Ed Gray, director of Partnering Programs for Avid, said: "Universal Audio is one of the most innovative and admired companies in the audio space. The combination of Pro Tools and the UAD platform will provide our customers with even more options to create signature sounds with analog warmth, regardless of which Pro Tools system they are working on."