Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

Ok, so… you’ve restarted and then repaired your disk permissions and still your application won’t open, or worse, exhibits some very bizarre behavior. What should you do? Aside from wiping your system and reinstalling the OS and application!

Many times the issue may be caused by corrupt preferences. Preferences are the settings that an application loads everytime it is opened. It could be related to I/O, your session setup, your playback engine…. all kinds of settings that persist from session to session.

There is a wonderful new utility that finds all of these files/folders and moves them to the trash. Once you restart (there we go again! Don’t be afraid to restart!) ProTools will reset all of your preferences. You can find it here

ProTools Prefs and Database Helper

Now, the resetting of your preferences may be a drag, so I suggest, once you have your system up and running smoothly, use the Backup and Restore functionality in the Helper application. This will allow you to freely trash your prefs but also to restore your system to a working state that maintains your personal settings.

Notice at the bottom of that screenshot there is a very important symbol. It is the PayPal donate symbol. We as a community MUST support those developers who are supporting us by creating wonderful utilities such as the ProTools Prefs and Database Helper. I do not personally know Jean Charles Deshaies but I am grateful for this mini application and I want him to continue to update for new versions of PT and new versions of the Mac OS. I would gladly buy him a coffee (even a high-priced one!) everytime I use this utility. Doing the paypal donate is a small gesture of support and in reality, his little application saves me a lot of time when I use it.

I have a few more tips on troubleshooting ProTools coming up next!

It always seems to happen at the worst possible time, and it isn’t just Pro Tools, it happens with every single application I use everyday… Mail, DP, Word, Filemaker Pro you name it. There are just times when the application, inexplicably, is not very happy about running a session, the very same session you ran the day before! In Pro Tools land there are a few very good troubleshooting steps to take when things seem to go astray.

FIRST - RESTART YOUR MACHINE. Yes, I’m shouting at you. I once had someone working for me, in another room of a facility. He called me and said, “Jeanine I can’t do…” I said. “Hey, that sounds weird, why don’t you restart the machine.” An hour later, I wander by the room he is using and I say, “How are things going?” He says, “Ok, but it is a bit slow since I can’t do…” I make him stop, save and restart. Guess what? Once rebooted the machine and PT were very happy. So rather than waste the two minutes it takes to restart, my lovely assistant spent an hour working around an easily fixable problem…

SECOND - On the mac, repair permissions. The UNIX undercarriage of the Mac OS X system carries a lot of capability. Sometimes a thing known as “the permissions” for a file can be set incorrectly. It is a simple process to fix, go to your Utilities folder (inside the Applications folder) and open up the application called Disk Utility. Click on your drive in the left hand column and click on the First Aid tab in the top center of the window. Then click Repair Permissions and let it do its thing. Wonders will commence…