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A Beginners Guide to Pro Tools, Part 5

Preparing to edit and Creating new tracks

Before you start editing, run through the following brief sections on opening the Edit window and setting playback operation preferences.

The Edit Window

At this point we are only concerned with the Edit window, where tracks are arranged horizontally and all Editing operations occur.

Make sure the Edit window is open by selecting Window>Edit (Apple-W) from the Pro Tools toolbar at the top of the screen.

If you wish, you may have the Edit window fill the screen by going to the uppermost left-hand corner of the window and clicking the little green “+” button.

Edit Window

Controlling Playback Operation

There are three settings that should be selected to ensure headache-free operation. They should be set via the menus as follows.

  1. Pro Tools>Preferences…>Operation> check box for: “Timeline Insertion Follows Playback”
  2. Options>Link Timeline and Edit Selections (select and leave checked)
  3. Options>Scrolling>Page (select and leave checked)

You can start and stop playback is by pressing the space bar. Try it out.

Also, in the Edit window there will always be a small set of “transport” controls (i.e. Play, Stop, Rewind, FF, go to the beginning, etc.) in the upper right of the window. If you’d prefer a bigger, floating transport display, go to Window>Transport (or press Apple-1).

Let’s Make Tracks!

If you recorded new audio or used the Import option “Audio to Track”, you will already have at least one mono or stereo audio track in the Edit window.

To create new or additional tracks , go to Track > New (or File > New Track on PT6 or earlier) in the menu bar at the top of the screen. This window will appear-

New track

Select the number of tracks to create and the type: mono or stereo. Typically you will want mono tracks for interviews or narration. Stereo may be useful for stereo ambient sound recordings or stereo background music from a CD, for example. In ProTools 7 you can add multiple tracks of different types by clicking the + at the right side of this window.

Here is the Edit window with two new mono tracks.

Edit window

You can freely drag and drop audio between tracks, or from the “Region List” to a track using the Grabber tool (see below). (Remember the number of channels must match, i.e. mono for mono, stereo for stereo.)

Next: Working in the Edit window »