SUMMERY:

Clean up your sessions and learn to Manage your projects.

Managing your Pro Tools projects is just as important as knowing how to mix them. If you don't learn how to clean up your sessions, you’ll end up with folders that are huge in gigabytes, slow cpu performance, and even worse you can end up with files missing. Make sure you avoid these dreaded problems with some techniques I’ve learned during my time with Pro Tools.

1st. Delete those Unused Files

Recording in a digital multi-track enviroment can take up massive amounts of hard drive space, especially after doing tons of vocal comps! Try to keep things tidy during the recording process, though you do need to be careful not to delete the takes you want to keep, always keep a watchful eye on how much unused crap that gets built up in a session.

Go to the Regions list to the right of the Edit window in Pro Tools. It’s probably best to widen it so you get a good view of what you’ll be deleting. I ALWAYS have it open:




Click on the arrow-in-a-circle button in the top right of the Regions list to open a drop-down menu. Under the Select menu, click on Unused. Your regions list will now highlight all the unused audio in your session. Now go back to the drop-down menu and click on Clear. You’ll see the following dialogue box:




Hold the Alt button and hit delete to get rid of all the unused files in one fell swoop. Make sure you click Delete and NOT Remove if you want to clear hard drive space. Choosing to hit Remove will simply take the files out of the list, leaving them in the folder, and making it really difficult to get rid of unused files later on.

2nd. The Workspace Window

Lets talk about this window a bit. Have you ever recorded some music and then transfered your session onto another hard drive or usb stick to take it somewhere else only to find some audio is missing? If you anwsered yes then this window will be especially useful to you. Lets take a look. Go to window,workspace. It looks like this:




The first thing you will notice is all your mounted hard drives. Next to each one is a little letter. The letters next to your mounted drives stand for T for transfer, R for Record and P for Playback. These options decides what Pro Tools will allow that mounted drive to be used for. All you got to do is click and choose on a drive and select how you want Pro Tools to interact with that drive. As I said this can become very useful to know so you don't accidently start recording audio onto the wrong Hard drive.

There you go. No more missing files when transfering your session onto another storage device. There are a few other neat things about the workspace window but for now I just wanted to show you what I find to be very useful about it.




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