Pro Tools wrestles me to the ground, shoulders pinned..

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 2:42 pm

Last night as I got home and sat down to work on my tunes with the precious couple of hours I have at the end of the day to do such things, I ended up screwing things up before I could begin.

Oh, bittersweet DAW, why do you torment me so?

Alright whatever. So here's what I did wrong:

As I was opening the first Session, I looked at the location of the folder (with songs I've been working on) in my external FW800 drive. As I've been pieceing the album together, I've found it bothersome that when I need to go to that folder, I have to click through 4 sub-catagories, scrolling up and down, to arrive at the location of the folder that has the songs in it. If only PT LE had the lovely "Open Recent Set" functionality that Live has, but no.

So before I opened the first song I thought, forget this, I'll just move the location of the folder in my FW drive so it's not in the distant sub-catagory any longer, I'll move it to the top so it's the first folder I see when I click to open a Session. So I clicked on the FW800 drive icon on my desktop, scrolled down and found the album's folder, and grabbed and dropped it all the way to the top.

Then I went back into PT and went through the motions to open a Session. Sure enough the floder was now in the 2nd column of the drive, I clicked it and clicked on the song I intended to work on.

Error, error, file allocation blah blah. Would you like PT to relink automatically? Yes. Couple minutes go by, one track out of 24 appears. Nothing happens, etc, etc, etc. Start pulling out hair, steam shoots out ears.

Then my studio partner gets home at 11PM and she's got a bunch of stuff from Ikea. Spend the next 3 hours building a cool kitchen counter shelf unit. Get 3/2 hours of sleep. Then I write this post.

Help.

fluid · Post by **fluid** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 3:27 pm

I think the easiest/best way to relocate session files is within ProTools itself. Under the file menu, there is a "Save Session Copy In..." command, and you will be able to save the session files to another location, and ProTools will change the disc allocation for you. Next time you open the session it will ask you if you want to check the new disc allocation, just click no and you should be good to go.

smart1123 · Post by **smart1123** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 4:49 pm

Try using manual relink in the task window, if your tracks are all the same length you could just spot them into a new session (this won't work if you have lots of plug-ins running obviously). Come to think of it you could open the session, skip relinking, import the tracks and spot them in. Go into spot mode, disable "Auto Spot" if it is on (cmd-p) when you drag your files onto a track in the edit window a dialog box will appear asking you where you want to spot to, at the bottom of the dialog box you will see a timecode or bars/beats location, one saying original timestamp and one saying user, click the little arrow next to the number and hit return and your file will spot to it's original location on the timeline. Oh if you've made lots of edits without consolidating then this wont work either.

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:14 pm

Try using manual relink in the task window, if your tracks are all the same length you could just spot them into a new session (this won't work if you have lots of plug-ins running obviously). Come to think of it you could open the session, skip relinking, import the tracks and spot them in. Go into spot mode, disable "Auto Spot" if it is on (cmd-p) when you drag your files onto a track in the edit window a dialog box will appear asking you where you want to spot to, at the bottom of the dialog box you will see a timecode or bars/beats location, one saying original timestamp and one saying user, click the little arrow next to the number and hit return and your file will spot to it's original location on the timeline. Oh if you've made lots of edits without consolidating then this wont work either.

Lot's of edits? Lot's of plug-ins? Well, only about 2 1/2 months of nearly contant work's worth.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a go when I'm back home.

amo · Post by **amo** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:20 pm

Hi,

I often move sessions from a computer to another, to a hard drive to another etc... I get the "audio interface changed"... "I/O setup changed" blabla, but then if all audio files of the session are in the Audio Files folder, and that folder is in a same folder as the session, all is fine. So: did you record material outside your song's folder ?
I found that if by any chance Protools records to another hard drive (by my mistake), it creates a folder and names it the same as my session, whereever it records the audio.
Do you have one session containing all your songs ? I didn't get that part well...
So give a try making a search on all your drives with the nema of your seesion to see if other folders with the same name have been created...

Hope you get it to work !
All the best,

amo

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:54 pm

So: did you record material outside your song's folder ?

Hey amo,

No, I just dragged and dropped the 'folder' that contained the songs from one column of the external FW Drive to another column, within the same drive.

It's probably one of those relatively simple things to fix, seeing as what I did intentionally could easily be accidentally or unintentionally done by a sloppy swipe of the mouse.

It's just one of those eye opening events that makes you realize you don't know your shit well enough. The sort of event that seems to happen every week.

Sam

amo · Post by **amo** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 6:04 pm

Sales Dude McBoob wrote:
So: did you record material outside your song's folder ?
Hey amo,

No, I just dragged and dropped the 'folder' that contained the songs from one column of the external FW Drive to another column, within the same drive.

It's probably one of those relatively simple things to fix, seeing as what I did intentionally could easily be accidentally or unintentionally done by a sloppy swipe of the mouse.

It's just one of those eye opening events that makes you realize you don't know your shit well enough. The sort of event that seems to happen every week.

Sam

Weird ! As I was saying, even from a computer to another, I never have any problems... It of course always asks if I want to check the disk allocation etc...
Our sessions are basically radio masters, one hour each, and we don't even save the jingles in every session, but they are on each computer, on a different hard drive from the recording drive. PT asks if it should relink those jingles and always finds them. Can take a bit long (longer is the TDM

) but it always finds them.

Tell us what exactly is missing, is it audio ? fades ? everything ?

Ableton forum: the best place to get Pro Tools support

glu · Post by **glu** » Fri Dec 23, 2005 8:58 pm

If memory serves me correctly, I copy and pasted an entire song folder "SONG A" with sessions and the two folders with audio/fades inside. I do let the allocation go when I open PTLE, usually takes a little while, but I have rarely had problems. I know very little about Pro Tools, compared to many people on the DUC, so It is quite intimidating posting there at times.

Good luck, let us know what works for you!

glu

telekom · Post by **telekom** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 1:10 am

Hi McBoob,
Did you try putting the files back in place manually? Plus I have to say... was it easier to try assembling IKEA units or trying to fix up Protools? Sometimes another nightmarish scenario helps to blot out the first nightmarish scenario...

Shit I lost the Allen key...

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 4:53 am

When I got back from gift shopping tonight the apartment was still turned upside down. The Ikea unit I had partially assembled still needed another hour of work, roommie went Ikea crazy on the bathroom, and non-Ikea shelves were installed in the walls of the studio. A big overhaul. But now we have cute little boxes to store the cables and power supplies and effects pedals in. This is what happens when your studio partner is female. And it's pretty sweet.

So I didn't get a go at it tonight.

But I'm going to go ahead and say the Pro Tools debacle will be harder to solve simply because if something doesn't quite work in Pro Tools, under no circumstances can you whip out a power drill to widen a hole to make it work.

Sales Dude McBoob · Post by **Sales Dude McBoob** » Sat Dec 24, 2005 7:51 pm

I think the easiest/best way to relocate session files is within ProTools itself. Under the file menu, there is a "Save Session Copy In..." command, and you will be able to save the session files to another location, and ProTools will change the disc allocation for you. Next time you open the session it will ask you if you want to check the new disc allocation, just click no and you should be good to go.

Nice, that worked just fine.

First times a charm! Fluid, I owe you some fluid. Have a big Berlin-style stein of fluid on me. Somehow...

Goes to show ya, I had the same post on the DUC and forty eight hours of it being posted yielded only one, one sentence response. Something like "If you know where the files are just relink them yourself."

Thank goodness for this nurturing community.