File management is not something a lot of us like to deal with.

Keeping track of twenty regions on one track can be hard enough, let alone an entire session. One thing that can be helpful is using the File Consolidation option at the end of a session.

Here's how you do it:

After you finish recording for the day, go back and check all your punch in and out points. Make sure all your punches are clean and no regions have been cut off or clipped by accident.

Then, highlight all the regions in the tracks you're working with and apply a batch fade across all of them. (Edit>Fades>Create) Usually, a 5 millisecond fade length will be just fine.

Next, check and make sure your track names are all labeled appropriately. Many times during a session, it's easy to create a bunch of audio tracks on the fly and forget to name them. Remember: The track name dictates what the region name will be when recording. This also holds true for file consolidation. The new file that this creates gets its name from the track name. So, if you have a bunch of tracks labeled Audio 1, Audio 2, etc., File Consolidation may get rid of a lot of punch points and edits, but it will not help you when navigating through the regions list for a particular file.

Now that everything is cleaned up and named properly, highlight all the regions (and the spaces between them) in all the tracks you're working with. Go to: Edit>Consolidate, and behold, brand new files all named appropriately!

But wait there's more:

Now that all the files have been consolidated (which makes entirely new regions of audio), to be totally thorough you now need to go back and get rid of all the other regions or segments of regions in the session. So now, all you'll be working with will be the new consolidated files. Go to the Regions Menu and under the Select drop down menu, choose: Unused. Now, under the same Regions menu, go back and select: Clear Selected. After the dialog box pops up, you have two options: Remove or Delete. Unless you just want that extra audio hanging around on the audio drive, select Delete. Now, you're good to go with all properly named and consolidated audio files, which will make life a lot easier.

By consolidating your tracks after finishing one phase of a project, you can not only free up space on your hard drive, but make locating files for future reference a lot easier.