For years, Pro Tools has been the notable holdout among major DAWs when it comes to MIDI Polyphonic Expression. While Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio, and Logic Pro built out increasingly deep MPE workflows, Pro Tools users working with expressive controllers had to rely on workarounds. That's starting to change: at NAMM 2026, Avid previewed native MPE support for Pro Tools | Music Creation, alongside a new MIDI Editing Mode and several other MIDI-focused upgrades.

What Avid showed at NAMM

According to Avid's NAMM 2026 press materials and coverage from Sound On Sound, the company demonstrated tech previews at its booth covering MPE support, a redesigned MIDI Editing Mode, Track Pin, and enhanced Speech-to-Text features. These previews were shown alongside other additions like Splice integration and MIDI Playlists, suggesting Avid is treating this as a broader push to modernize Pro Tools' MIDI engine rather than a single isolated feature.

Details on the exact scope of MPE support — whether it will cover per-note pitch bend, pressure, and slide across all supported instrument tracks, or arrive in a more limited first pass — haven't been fully specified yet. As is typical with NAMM tech previews, Avid has not committed to a firm release date for the feature reaching shipping versions of Pro Tools.

Why this matters for MPE players

Pro Tools remains deeply entrenched in post-production, film scoring, and professional recording studios, environments where composers increasingly want to record expressive performances from controllers like the Roli Seaboard, Expressive E Osmose, or Haken Continuum. Without native MPE, those musicians have had to record each note's expression data as a workaround or track their expressive performances in a secondary DAW before importing stems into Pro Tools for mixing.

Native MPE support would let composers keep expressive MIDI performances editable inside Pro Tools itself — a meaningful workflow improvement for anyone scoring to picture or working across large orchestral templates that increasingly include MPE-driven virtual instruments.

Where this leaves the DAW landscape

Pro Tools' move follows a broader trend of MPE support becoming table stakes for professional DAWs. As of mid-2026, Ableton Live, Bitwig Studio, Logic Pro, Cubase, Studio One, and Reaper all offer some level of MPE editing. Notably, FL Studio has said it will skip MPE in favor of building around MIDI 2.0 per-note controllers instead, and Reason and LUNA still lack MPE support entirely — so the field remains split between DAWs betting on MPE as the current expressive-MIDI standard and those waiting on wider MIDI 2.0 adoption.

For working composers who've been waiting on Avid specifically, this NAMM preview is the clearest signal yet that MPE is coming to Pro Tools, even if the shipping timeline isn't locked down. Musicians who rely on Pro Tools for post work but track expressive performances elsewhere should keep an eye on Avid's release notes over the coming months.

It's also worth noting how this fits into the wider MIDI 2.0 conversation. MIDI 2.0's per-note controllers offer a standardized alternative to MPE's channel-splitting approach, and some manufacturers are betting that MIDI 2.0 adoption will eventually make MPE a transitional technology. Avid's choice to preview MPE specifically, rather than waiting for MIDI 2.0 to mature across the industry, suggests the company sees near-term demand from composers who already own MPE hardware today rather than waiting for a broader ecosystem shift.

Staying up to date

Avid typically rolls previewed features into point updates over the following release cycles, so it's worth watching the Pro Tools product page and Avid's press room for the official announcement once MPE support moves from tech preview to a shipping build.