Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

In Lesson 3 of the Pro Tools 101 course, the students step through an exercise where they investigate how files are stored when recording into a session. It is always a good idea to know where your files are and Pro Tools makes it easy to keep everything organized. One of the tasks in the lesson though, demonstrates what happens when you’ve recorded audio and then neglected to save! The good news is, as long as you didn’t UNDO the recording it will still create and store the new audio files for you. That’s great news for someone to hear! Especially if they’ve just recorded an incredible, once in a lifetime take!

After the initial “Oh thank goodness that audio file exists somewhere” sigh of relief, the next question is always, “Well, how do I get that back into my session?” There are two basic ways, the labor intensive manual way and the sleek and smooth automatic way. The labor intensive way requires that you manually add the audio back to the session and then play around in slip mode and/or with nudge as you try to make the audio play in sync with the initial recording. This can be very easy to do if you started the recording at the beginning of the session or on some known bar line or timing reference. Just drop the sound file back on Bar 2 beat 3, or at 1:00 into the song and everything is ready to go!

But what if you just punched into record when you felt the time was right and you don’t know where your recording should sit in the timeline? That is where Pro Tools’ timestamping function comes in handy. Pro Tools is watching your back, without you perhaps knowing, the application actually kept a record of where you recorded that audio! Using the SPOT mode available within Pro Tools you can simply import the audio into a session and place it back in a track at the same point that it was recorded at. Take a look at the dialogue box that appears when you drop a file on the edit window while in Spot mode:

Notice how the program knows where the file was originally recorded. By pressing the triangle button to the right of the original time stamp Pro Tools will set the start point of the spot mode to match the original time (in this case Bar 5 Beat 4 Tick 955 will replace Bar 9 Beat 2 Tick 444). Also notice that you can, during the course of editing a project, create a user time stamp, and then use that user time stamp as the reference for Spot mode. The timestamp function is found in the Region bin menu inside Pro Tools.

So this all sounds perfect, right? Well, as in all things that have to do with computers saving you time, there are some catches. The timestamp does not always travel between different DAWs and sometimes not even between audio files created with the same program.

The timestamp function is one that is implemented in a few different ways. Some audio files themselves can carry their timestamp with them via an area known as MetaData, but not all. There are times when you will import a sound file that does not have timestamp information. In those cases you will need to revert to your ears and your own musicality to place your audio in the right position, but it is always worth the effort to see if the file can tell you where it was recorded, this trick alone has saved me from hours of manual placing and nudging on many occasions!