Professional Grade Audio Services
Archive for March, 2012
A Must Know: Enable Session File Backups
This is one of my favorite tips. If it wasn’t for this feature, many computer screens would have been smashed in and thrown outside studio windows.
If Pro Tools has ever crashed on you right when you were in the middle of adding some nice new creative juice, you’ll immediately appreciate this feature.
It’s a simple feature to use and understand, so I’ll jump right into it.
Easily Remove Silence from Regions in Pro Tools
I originally did a write up on this, but then did a video for it. So here is the video. If for whatever reason you’d rather read how to do this, you can read that down at the bottom below the video.
So this is a pretty easy but very useful little tip. Sometimes when you’re running a session that has a bunch a full audio tracks, meaning, from session start to session end, all the regions are uncut, even when there is no audio within certain parts of them, protools can become sluggish or give you the “Cannot access hard drive fast enough” error.
This tip can help you quickly get rid of all the wasted unused region space. You can also use this to easily cut out any un wanted background noise.
1. Select the regions you want to strip. If it’s the entire session, highlight all the regions.
2. After highlighting all the regions, go to Edit > Strip Silence
(click to enlarge)
2. Now a little strip silence box will come up. Adjust your Strip Threshold until the boxes are only surrounding areas with no audio in them.
(click to enlarge)
3. You can adjust the Start Pad and End Pad just to give your audio files a little tiny buffer so it doesn’t cut out the very start or very end low signal.
And that’s pretty much it.
So this is a pretty easy but very useful little tip. Sometimes when you’re running a session that has a bunch a full audio tracks, meaning, from session start to session end, all the regions are uncut, even when there is no audio within certain parts of them, protools can become sluggish or give you the “Cannot access hard drive fast enough” error.
This tip can help you quickly get rid of all the wasted unused region space. You can also use this to easily cut out any un wanted background noise.
1. Select the regions you want to strip. If it’s the entire session, highlight all the regions.
2. After highlighting all the regions, go to Edit > Strip Silence
(click to enlarge)
2. Now a little strip silence box will come up. Adjust your Strip Threshold until the boxes are only surrounding areas with no audio in them.
(click to enlarge)
3. You can adjust the Start Pad and End Pad just to give your audio files a little tiny buffer so it doesn’t cut out the very start or very end low signal.
And that’s pretty much it.
Quick Tip: Add Click Track & Tap Tempo – Pro Tools
Here’s two quick tips I decided to put into one post because they will be very short and they are so easy. Also because they go hand in hand. But just because they are easy doesn’t mean they are obvious and if you didn’t know them, you’ll be glad you do now.
The first one is adding a click track to your session:
Rip!: A Remix Manifesto – Great Video on Remixing and Copyright Law
Check out this documentary on remixing and how the law views issues regarding this. It’s definitely worth watching the entire video if you’re an aspiring DJ/Producer or an artist. There’s no old and boring lectures either! It’s an up-to-date, well directed film. Check it out!
How to Dramatically Reduce Session Size
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Here I’ll go through how to reduce the size of your sessions (dramatically sometimes). This is another great tip for preparing your sessions to be sent over the internet to, for example, a Mix Engineer.
If you haven’t read my post on “How to properly send your session“, read that as well as this one. It will definitely make your life that much easier when preparing your sessions for sending out.
Note: I do suggest most of the time (unless you’re absolutely positive you won’t need any hidden takes) to follow the steps in the “How to send your session” post before following these steps. Because if you apply this to your main session you will remove the audio files that aren’t being used in the session, which is Ok, but if you ever realize you needed a certain take that you saved in a playlist, it will be gone.
How to Properly Send Your Session
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So, to open up the blog, I’ve decided to post this little tip that will make your life so much easier while sending sessions around the world or over the internet or just transferring them to another hard drive.
Most of the time, people tend to just go to where they’ve saved their session and drag and drop it to another hard drive or to a server somewhere on the internet. While this method works sometimes, it fails most of the time.
One reason is because, sometimes all the audio files in your session are not necessarily saved with the rest of your session files. For example, if you’re a producer and you like to “Drag & Drop” files into your session from your computer, the actual file stays in the location that you found it, verses using “Import Audio” which COPIES the file to the folder that contains the rest of the sessions files.
This is one reason you always see this: – Yeah I hate it too.
Well the solution to this besides relocating all the files manually (if you even have the files), is to Save a Copy of your session. This is how you do that:
1. Start by going to File > Save Copy In:
2. After clicking on Save Copy In, you’ll be brought to this screen:
4. Select your Desktop there on the left and hit Save. It will then show you a progress bar. When it’s complete, you can then Drag and Drop the Copied folder anywhere you want without any worries. BUT, If you’re going to send it to someone over the internet, follow this last step and you’ll be golden boy (or girl).
5. Time to ZIP the folder. The reason we do this is to package all the files into a single file, kind of like putting everything in a box and shipping it. Then when it gets to its destination, it can by taken out of its box (unzipped).
Head over to your desktop, right click the folder and select (in this case) [Compress "Copy of Things You Do"].
Here’s the result:
Now you’re ready to send this session to anyone anywhere.
