Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 Tutorials
Sessions / Session Folder Layout
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Subtitles of the Movie (Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 / Sessions / Session Folder Layout)
In this movie, we will see how Pro Tools LE stores its files on the hard drive. Audio software stores its files on disk differently than say a word processor or a spreadsheet file and it's important to know the differences especially if you start to have storage related problems with your audio files. Let's examine how Pro Tools saved this session. To do this, I am going to shrink the size of this Pro Tools session window and go to my Media B drive, which is where I saved this session. See right here, my new song, notice how it's saved as a folder instead of just a single file. If we open up the disclosure triangle for this folder, you will see there are two files and two folders. Here is the actual session file that was saved. The extension pts means Pro Tools session. This cache wfm is a cache waveform file that's created temporarily by Pro Tools. You can pretty much ignore it because Pro Tools will delete it when you close your session. However, we have this audio files and this fade files folders which currently don't have anything in them. I will go back to my Pro Tools session and record something. If you would like to understand all the things I just did to record this guitar, check up the chapter on recording into Pro Tools. Now if I go back and look at my disk drive, I have two audio files that have just appeared in the audio files folder, a left and a right channel because I made a stereo recording. That's what the L and the R in the names mean. Notice too how the file extensions are a .wav which is the file type I specified in my session set up. I will go close My Document, watch what happens. Notice the only thing remaining is the audio files folder and the Pro Tools session file. That's because the cache was automatically deleted and there were no fades created. So the fades files folder was deleted. If I had not recorded any audio, then this audio files folder would have been deleted as well. I will open up this Pro Tools session again and create a fade. We will cover how to create fades in a later movie. For now, just observe what happens on the disk. Now there should be some fade files. Yep, there they are, very cryptically named. Now when I close this session, the fade files folder stays. This structure right here is what Pro Tools uses when it stores its files. Session document contained within a folder of the same name and two folders, audio files and fade files that accompany it. The only exception to this is when you tell Pro Tools to save your audio files on more than one drive in order to increase throughput. But that's a more advanced subject we are not going to cover here.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 |
| Author: | Nathan Dickson |
| SKU: | 33599 |
| ISBN: | 1-932808-46-9 |
| Release Date: | 2005-02-25 |
| Duration: | 9 hrs / 101 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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