Hella Solutions blog: "Document. Share. Inspire."

I’m no pro on ProTools but I spent about 3 1/2 hours trying to figure this out so I thought there just might be someone out there that could benefit from this lesson. I’m a Windows user and my external hard drive is therefore Windows based. All of the computers on the UCSC campus are Mac (at least the ones in the media lab that I use). So, the story goes that I’m going to meet up with a friend who has a lot more experience using ProTools and she is going to help me level and EQ my project. I bring my hard drive with all my ProTools sessions up to campus. The first day we try this ProTools doesn’t find half of the tracks in my piece. To resolve this I go home and do a copy of my session and make sure the “copy all audio files” box is checked. Cutting to the chase, the next time we get together and try to work, the same effing issue occurs. F*ck! I try manually linking all the missing tracks and everything is going fine until the Mac and/or ProTools gets some kind of fatal error (one that I’m continually told by Mac-heads that only Windows machines get…wutever Mac people). Anyway, I give up…not really, I’m determined at this point.

So, I try one more thing. Instead of opening my project in ProTools and then having ProTools save the project onto the Mac hard drive I manually drag my project folder onto the Mac desktop and THEN open the project. Folks, if you want to save yourselves some time do this first! I’m not exactly sure what is going on but one issue is that because the two hard drives are running different platforms you can’t write from one to the other; only copy files from the PC drive to the Mac drive. Why ProTools doesn’t copy all of the audio files when it is transferring is beyond me (especially since when I manually looked for the files the program had no problems finding everything).

This all took so much time that I still haven’t leveled my audio…