Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

In the PT101 class, this week’s lesson involves working on saving and not saving sessions after recording to investigate how Pro Tools deals with all of the various audio you use in a session. One of the things that happens during the lesson, is that some audio is stored in one folder while other audio may be stored in another folder.

How does this happen?

Well, every session has a defined “disk allocation” setting that is stored with it. If you have started with a “new” session, the disk allocation is automatically set to what is considered the “root media” folder. From the help file we read:

“By default, Pro Tools records audio files to the Audio Files folder inside the session folder. You can use the Disk Allocation window to specify other locations for your audio files for each audio track.”

In practice, this means if you open the application and create a new session the “root media” folder will be set to the new PT session folder created for this project. In this screenshot, we can see I have created a new session on my hard drive (which is named “Projects”). What the Disk Allocation window is telling me, is that all new audio recorded will be saved inside the audio files folder inside the session folder which is on the projects drive.

Note that the disk allocation can be set for individual tracks! This is used on very large sessions where one drive can not provide the throughput or bandwidth to physically playback (or record) all of the tracks at one time.

Now, things start to get messy when you start moving sessions from one system or even one drive to another. If I save this session, and use the OS to copy it to a new area on my hard drive or a new hard drive entirely, I will create potential problems for myself. The reason for this, is that the PT session file will remember where the original audio files folder was located and continue to write new files to that location!

So the safe way, to move sessions, is either to use the Save Session Copy menu item or, if a session has been moved/copied in another way, use the Disk Allocation setup to set the correct audio files folder to record into.