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October 18th, 2002
Riddle me this transomers:
I’ve got a liberal amount of audio I dumped onto a PC laptop and later into ProTools Free for mixing + editing. All that went fine…project completed, thanks in large part to advice read here. My question now is how to create back-ups of the audio source files located in PTF before I clear them off of the computer for good? They are there..I can see them in the AUDIO folder taking up precious hard drive space…but I can’t extract them and burn back-up copies onto discs. The other audio programs (CD creator, Sound Forge, take your pick…) don’t recognize the .wav files once they’re in PT jail. Might there be some secret passageway to free these prisoners of conscience?
Viva la resistance.
Charles Maynes
the best way to back this stuff up is to copy the whole session folder over to a CDR, if it will fit… Be sure to include the session file(s) and the audio folder with all its files and the fades folder with all its little files.
Use CD creator, or Toast, or whatever CD burning program you have to burn a data CD.. NOT AN AUDIO CD!!!
Be careful to select a format that won’t truncate your file names.
If you have lots of extra files you didn’t end up using in the project, and you don’t want to save them, you can go the the audio bin on the right of the edit window and "select all unused", then delete them from the hard drive (make sure you’re not using them for something else….)
Then you can burn as above, or go to "save a copy as" and check the box for "duplicate sound files". This will make a new copy of your sesson, so you need some extra disc space for a little while. Then burn that group of files to a CDR, and you’re done.
if your project is too big, you can split-up the audio tracks over separate discs, as long as you remember to put them all back into the audio folder when you go to work on the project again. Make notes!
I have a bunch of old Pro Tools sessions taking up space on my PC hard drive and want to free up space to work on a new piece.
I drug the sessions over to my CDR drive and copied them. I can see them on the disk when I open it up via ‘My Computer’. Ready to old sessions now.
Trouble is, when I tried to open up an old session via the CD, I get a message that says, ‘session must be on valid audio drive’. I can only open up the sessions via my hard drive, so therefore: I’m reluctant to erase them. I don’t know why I’d care, since I don’t even like them; but since I put in a lot of time on them, I can’t bear for them to vanish completely.
Are these sessions really saved? I need the Pro Tools version of Dr. Phil to tell me, "All is recorded, don’t worry… it’s time to erase and move on."
Sorry, that’s the only Dr Phil quote i could bring to mind….
Anyway. Yeah, ProTools doesn’t like to play sessions off of CDs, or even other perfectly good drives. But most likely all is well…. If you can see the files, then they most likely copied over OK. Just to be safe, try dragging oneof the sessions and its files back over to the original drive (into a different folder) and see if the session plays properly. If so, and if you used the same techniques in each case, you can be pretty confident that you archived properly. So copy session files and audio files, fades, whatever else might be in the session, to the CDR, burn it, and erase the originals.
Take a deep breath, it’s going to be OK.
Tried what you said, works just fine. Thanks.
Also, thanks for the timely response. It’s very cool that: the person who wrote the guide that introduced me to ProTools ALSO took the time to solve a personal tech question I had. This is exactly why Transom will achieve its goal of bring new voices to public radio. The site is just so damn encouraging to any random anybody out there, working away on an oft-rented Marantz and overworked E-Machine.
Apologies for the lame Dr. Phil joke. I think a Dave Letterman parody was on in the background or something. You are good man for only knowing one quote.
hey someone anyone:
so i finished my piece, and pardon me from being protools incompetent, but i wanted to know about exporting it into a workable format. i have been able to "bounce to disk" which creates an unidentifiable, yet surprisingly, playable file of about 198MB (the piece is only about ten minutes)….is there some shareware audio converter that can change this monster into something reasonable? or is there a way i can export it into something more workable? please help!
"FOR being…" not from..
Using a Mac, MBox & ProTools 6, how do I get it so I’m listening to the sound I’m working on through the computer’s speakers rather than my measly headphones?
There are drivers that should have been downloaded with PT 6+ that will allow you to play your output through your speakers. Go to system preferences, speakers and click on the drivers.
My own experience is that these drivers do hang up the computer, and there is sometimes difficulty shifting to other sound devices, like iTunes.
My personal advice is to invest in a pair of studio monitors for your output. 1. They work better, without hanging up the mac or PT, 2. They allow you to hear- and mix – sound with much more realistically. Before I got the studio monitors, I mixed using headphones or the mac speakers. Invariably the final mix would not be right with voice levels too low and music levels too high. Studio monitors produce a sound that is truer.
I know this doesn’t answer your question, but in general you’ll be better off listening on headphonees rather than tiny built-in computer speakers. If you’re talking about external computer speakers, just plug them into the headphone output rather than that back of the computer.
I’ll do some testing with routing audio through the internal speakers, I’ve never gotten that to work…