Even if the person who created the project has been thoughtful about naming his or her original tracks, and diligent in exporting them without auto-generated waffle, the chances are you’ll need to spend some time editing track names to reflect your own preferences.Īnother name-related limitation is that if you import all the files in one go, they’ll be ordered alphabetically in your Pro Tools session rather than in any sensible musical arrangement. One is that, as already mentioned, the tracks that Pro Tools creates to accommodate each file will automatically inherit the filename as the track name. To balance out this bonus, however, there are also quite a few limitations to the New Track approach. By contrast, with the Clip List approach, you don’t even get to hear the raw unmixed session in its entirety until the end of the process. Perhaps the biggest advantage of the New Track option is that it gives you a session that can be played back immediately, so within seconds of hitting the Done button, you can be auditioning the project to check that all is as it should be. which way will you jump?Each strategy has its own pros and cons, and much will depend on the nature of the project. The other is to start with a template session containing lots and lots of pre-made tracks, and import the audio to the Clip List, whence each file can be dragged onto the appropriate track in the arrangement. One is to start with a session that is empty of audio tracks, and use the ‘New Track’ option in the Import Audio dialogue to import each file directly to a newly created track within the Edit window. In essence, there are two basic approaches. Once you’re confident that your collection of WAV files is ready to import, the question of which import strategy to adopt arises.
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Often, a minute’s work with a batch file-renaming utility in Windows or Mac OS will save you an awful lot of manual track naming further down the line.
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The other besetting sin of automated track export functions is that they often seem to generate very long and cumbersome filenames, for instance by prepending the date, project name, artist biography and medical history of the producer’s canary to the start of every track! If these immensely long filenames get inherited by Pro Tools tracks, they’ll be truncated to an apparently random series of characters, and it’ll be impossible to tell what track is what in the Mix window.
This can scan a batch of files, automatically detect whether the underlying audio in any stereo files is really mono, even if it’s not panned centrally, and save mono versions. Retaining these as stereo tracks in Pro Tools has no benefits that I can think of, clutters up your session and wastes system resources, so when I receive a collection of audio files to mix, the first thing I’ll do is run them through Soundizers’ invaluable StereoMonoizer utility (shown above). Most DAWs now make it fairly easy to automate the process of batch exporting individual tracks as separate audio files, but in doing so, they have a wasteful habit of exporting mono parts to stereo files. Pre-flight Checksīefore weighing up those options, however, there are a couple of steps that I always go through before even opening Pro Tools. Assuming this is the case, there are two possible strategies available for rebuilding this arrangement for mixing within Pro Tools, and which one is the more appropriate will depend on several different factors.
Hopefully, the person sending the project will be savvy enough with the operation of their own DAW to have exported each element of their arrangement to an individual, unprocessed 24-bit audio file spanning the entire duration of the song. Getting this material in a state where you can even begin to work on it often feels like running a race just to get to the starting line, so it’s useful to think about the most efficient ways of turning a collection of WAV files into a mix-ready Pro Tools session. If you’re a mix engineer who uses Pro Tools, chances are you’ll get sent mix projects that originate in other recording packages. StereoMonoizer from Soundizers is invaluable for preparing sessions that have been exported from other DAWs.Ī little planning can help you get up and running quickly with mix projects transferred from other DAWs.
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