Pro Tips for Pro Tools LE

Apr 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Gino Robair

           
 

If your song has a lot of edits and you're beginning to notice playback errors, try reducing the edit density in certain sections. For example, the strings of small regions and crossfades clustered together in a loop-based production may be putting a strain on your disk drive's ability to find and retrieve data. To mitigate the problem, use the Consolidate Selection function. Once your regions are set and you're sure that you're finished making changes, highlight them and select Consolidate Selection under the Edit menu. The regions will be rendered into one file and automatically placed in the right spot in your session. Later, when you've finished the song and are removing unwanted regions before compacting your piece for archiving, you can select and remove the region files that your consolidated region replaced.

Digidesign also suggests that Mac users turn off the journaling feature for any media drives that they plan to use with Pro Tools LE. If you're using the Apple Disk Utility to format your drive, select Mac OS Extended rather than Mac OS Extended (Journaled). If you're recording to your boot drive with Pro Tools LE, you can select Disable Journaling using Disk Utility for better performance (although that will increase your computer's recovery time after a power failure).

Manuals and More

In addition to the features mentioned earlier in the article, version 6.7 added the Undo History window (select Show Undo History under the Windows menu), MIDI Detective, and Beat Detective LE (which is worthy of its own Master Class article). As with any program that has become an industry standard, there is plenty of reference material available for Pro Tools LE users. Start with the Pro Tools Reference Guide PDF, which is available for free online at www.digidesign.com/support/docs. At 678 pages, you may not want to print the entire document. It is, however, well organized and indexed. (A spiral-bound version is available online from the DigiStore.) Digidesign's document page also includes a PDF manual devoted to DigiBase, which is well worth reading. Any time you spend with either manual will pay off many times over.

For those of you looking for something to supplement the Digidesign documentation, there are numerous third-party resources available in book and CD-ROM format (see the sidebar “Resource Guides for Pro Tools LE”).

Gino Robair is a senior editor at EM.

SIDEBAR
Resource Guides for Pro Tools LE
Third-party resources for Pro Tools LE abound, and many of the books include CD-ROMS with templates and session examples. Before you buy any of the titles, go to your local bookstore and make sure that they cover the skill levels you need. Sample movies of the CD-ROM tutorials can be viewed online.

Visual Quickstart Guide — Pro Tools 6 for Macintosh and Windows, by Steven Roback (Peachpit Press, 2004)