Pro Tools Audio Files

One of the things I preach in my classes is to avoid round-robin (loosely managing your files) record allocation at all costs. The reason is that it’s a “solution to a problem that doesn’t necessarily exist anymore.” So what do you do if you find yourself using round-robin allocation and have audio scattered among multiple drives, folders, and projects? First thing to understand is how Pro Tools handles audio files. By default, an audio file created as a result of recording or audiosuite processing within a session is stored in that session’s audio files folder.

The key word here is DEFAULT. That means that the system, without any interaction from the user will store the files in a logical place, organized in a logical way. Now imagine yourself visiting the disk allocation window (located under the setup menu). Here you can change where audio recorded or processed files are stored on a track-by-track basis. You can also choose round-robin record allocation, which will distribute new audio tracks to all of the record capable drives on the system. Much like a poker dealer dealing out the cards to the players, except in this case, the cards are your audio files being flung across the table and the players are your drives. (Pretty scene isn’t it?)

There are two primary reasons a person would need to change the disk allocation settings:

1. Bandwidth requirements exceed a single drive’s capabilities
   This is a problem that was huge in the past and can still haunt some. Consider how much data is coming from the drive at any given point. The amount of data is affected by the number of tracks, sample frequency, bit depth, and edit density. If your drive is not capable of retrieving data at a high enough rate, it will cause Pro Tools to stop playback and give you an error to that effect. Modern hard drives have very high bandwidth capabilities and the vast majority of sessions are perfectly comfortable on a single drive. (hint: if you get an error related to this, try adjusting your DAE playback buffer first.)
2. Drive capacity is exceeded
   A..k.a, you’ve filled up your drive and need to get the session done, so you route all your tracks to another drive and carry on. Good rule of thumb: if your drive is more than half full, consider it completely full and don’t start any more projects on that drive. In each of those cases, there are solutions to be had before jumping straight to rerouting your audio tracks to different drives. However, it’s not always as cut and dry as simply changing a buffer or going out and buying a new drive before a project starts, so you have to know how to rescue yourself from the problems that can arise from scattering your files.

What are the problems you ask?

First and foremost is that things can get lost if you don’t carefully manage where they’re stored. A hard drive is little more than a huge storage bin. If you keep everything organized by project where all of the elements related to that project are stored within the session folder, you are less likely to accidentally delete something you need.

The worst-case scenario is to open a session and have it ask you to locate an audio file and find that the only copy of that audio file that ever existed was accidentally deleted while you were doing some housekeeping. If you didn’t realize that element was in the pile you were trashing, you’d be feeling really bad right about now. That level of depression would correspond to the level of importance of that file. Crying and cursing may occur. Blame would soon follow. The problem is that you’d likely want to put your blame on the system itself. That would be misplaced blame. (Yes, there are file retrieval tools, but don’t count on them to save you.)

So you haven’t jumped off the cliff yet. You know you may have some files scattered around the proverbial bit-bucket and you’d like to rectify that situation? Good. The first step is admitting you have a problem.

I’m glad to say that Digidesign has built into their system at least 3 ways to help you out of this mess. I’ll start with the most labor intensive, that way you’ll appreciate the easier ways when they come.

Show pathname in the regions list
You can do this by going to the regions menu (over top of the list) and selecting it from the “show” subcategory. Once you can see where your files are being stored, you can begin the sleuthing process of discovering which files are NOT in the location you want them in. Then you can locate them on the drive and copy them in the Finder (Mac) or Explorer (in Windows) to the proper location. After you delete them from the previous location and launch the session again, you’ll be prompted to locate those files. It shouldn’t take long since you’ll know precisely where they are. Do this twice in your lifetime with a client waiting behind you and you’ll NEVER let yourself get fouled up in file management again.

Save Copy In…

This function is really an extension of the normal save, save as, and save copy routine that every application has. Digidesign beefed it up with some options to make consolidation of scattered media elements much easier. It’s really simple. If you open the session and choose this option from the file menu, you can choose to “copy all audio files” and the system will then make a new session folder that will contain a copy of your session as well as an audio files folder with ALL of the audio files being referenced in the regions list. The downside is that it takes up more drive space since you’re making new copies of everything. The upside is that it makes a very quick archive of your session and relieves you of your scattered file problems.

Project browser.

Thank you, Digidesign. You really made life easier for people who suffer from scattered file syndrome (or as the academics refer to it as "SFS"). SFS can ruin lives and careers and while education to avoid it is available to those who seek it , even the strongest and most noble sometimes fall prey to the allure of a quick and dirty approach to file management. So I thank you for your service to the SFS community. Alas, what am I talking about? Well, if you visit the project browser, you will find a list of all the audio files in your session. If you scroll the window, you’ll find a ‘path’ heading that will tell you where the file is located, similar to the ‘show full pathname’ option in the regions list. The difference here is that you can select any file not stored in the current session’s audio files folder, then click the toolbox icon and find a “copy and relink” function. Three guesses as to what that will do for you! That’s right, it’s like a mixture of the ‘save copy in’ function and the manual copy function where it does it automatically for you. You’ll still have the residual copies out in the ether, but for the moment, we just care about our current session, right?

At the end of the day, what does it really matter if you have some stuff scattered around your system and all its hard drives? The worst-case scenario is that you lose something. Is that so bad? Is it the end of the world? Not at all, but in the professional world where the product for which you are most responsible is the very audio file or files we are discussing, losing a file could cost you a lot more than a little grief and agony. Lawsuits can occur over this stuff. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure? Absolutely. For our European readers, that would be a gram of prevention is worth a Kg of cure. ;-) Keeping your data backed-up is a major component to proper file management as well. We’ll tackle that topic in another article.