‘MX582′ posted this question recently on the Digidesign User Conference having experienced some problems when copying Pro Tools sessions from one drive to another…
So we did a session the other day on our internal drive in our mac pro running pro tools 8 and some how it saved all but a few of the audio files created during that session into a separate external hard drive that was hooked up to the computer. It created a session folder in that external drive with the session name but the only thing that was in it was the audio files folder with just the new files we recorded. I’m completely puzzled how this would happen. We didn’t have round robin allocation set or anything like that as far as i know…
‘DigiTechSupt’ asked….
Were you using a template or a previously created session that would have used the other drives folder for it’s audio?
‘johnnyv’ added…
Digi, we just had the same issue. Here’s our situation: Brand new Harpertown 8-core, fresh internal drive, fresh Leopard install, fresh PT8 install. A client brought us a session from another city, we copied that session in its entirety onto our hard drive. It was a 7.4.x session, which we opened in PT8. We worked on the song for several hours. When we finished the session, we put a full copy back onto another hard drive owned by the client. When he got home, he said that many of the audio files were missing. We went into the audio folder on our drive, and many of the files were there (roughly half). We could open the session fine, and we could see all the files, but WHERE WERE THEY? We found them on another hard drive hooked to our computer…just as the guy described above. On that drive, there was a folder with the session name, and inside of that, there was a single “Audio Files” folder which contained JUST THE MISSING FILES. So, IN THE MIDDLE OF A SESSION, for some reason, the location of our recorded files started to be stored on another hard drive! I was totally stumped.
‘Rail Jon Rogut’ correctly pointed out…
Just a heads up – never copy sessions with the Finder when sending out a copy for a client on their drive.. Use Save Copy In… and select to copy all the audio files.
‘Howardk’ agreed with Rail…
You can’t go wrong if you follow Rail’s advice on this. . . and by the same token, anything someone brings in on a transfer hard drive, open it on the drive, and use Save Copy In to copy it over to your work drive. THere are other ways to do this, safely, but this is simplest.
‘johnnyv’ responded…
Rail – Yes, that is advice well taken. From now on, that’s what we’ll do. However — I can also imagine us keeping backups for clients, and it’s troubling to know that PT is somehow switching up hard drive locations without anyone’s knowledge, so we should definitely get this sorted out. We also had no round robin allocation selected.
‘Rail Jon Rogut’ also suggested….
Make sure the drive in the Workspace was a “Record” drive.
‘johnnyv’ replied…
Well, that’s the weird thing, Rail. Half the audio files went where they should go…in the Audio Files folder in the ProTools Session Folder. The other files ended up on some random drive we have attached to our system; a drive having absolutely nothing to do with the session, PT8, the client’s files, etc. And this all happened within the span of one recording session over the course of about 8 hours. Totally weird.
‘Rail Jon Rogut’ asked the right question…
Can you open the session and check the disk allocation for the tracks which went to the wrong drive?
‘DigiTechSupt’ then asked…
And did you possibly have ‘Round Robin’ enabled in the Disk Allocation window?
‘mixboy’ added…
I have also experienced this. Disk allocation shows everything going to the correct place and round robin NOT selected. Yet files end up on some other drive – a drive on which that project has never resided before. Internal for me, as I only use externals for transfers/backups and they are powered off before I boot PT. But I have 5 internals in my G5. It’s literally like PT randomly decided to change disk allocation yet leaves no bread crumbs for finding out where they went.
‘johnnyv’ replied….
Digi, no Round Robin selected (checked it when this happened). It’s just like Mixboy Bob suggested…it’s like ALL OF A SUDDEN PT decides to put audio on some random drive without letting you know. I’ve never seen anything like it.
Rail, will have to get in front of the session again to answer your question 100% accurately. We were checking many things when we found the problem, and I want to answer your question accurately…which I will do later today…
‘carlos santana’ suggested a possible work round…
to not allow the system to have this error again you must set the recording drive to (R) and all of the others to transfer only (T) this way protools will only reccord & work on the one you want it to & not n the others
‘audiogeekzine’ suggested….
Also get to know the Copy and Relink function in the project browser
‘Howardk’ followed on….
Yes, the project browser is very handy for this. . . just sort the listing by drive/folder (click on the header way over on the right) and if anything is in a different drive or folder it is easy to see, and then you can right click on the filename to copy and relink. Everyone gets fooled by this and sometimes it can be very serious (when mistakes compound). . . I believe there really should be an indicator on the top of the edit window to goes red whenever there are files outside of the designated audio folder (ProTools really should have a dashboard with key information like this). . . .here is one thread on this topic.
DigiTechSupt then stated…
Pro Tools has never, in any test I’ve done, placed files randomly on a drive. I’ve heard this complaint on several occasions and have even gone to customers studios to witness it, only to find something in their workflow that’s causing the problem. I’m not saying it’s not possible – well, it really shouldn’t be – but I’ve yet to see concrete evidence that it’s putting files randomly on a drive.
‘johnnyv’ replied….
I’d be THRILLED to know that we have something set “wrong”. We haven’t been using PT8 for very long, so I hold it entirely possible that it is, in some fashion, “operator error”. BUT, in this case, I DON’T THINK THAT’S THE PROBLEM.
Rail, Digi and others, check this out…when I go to the session in question, the Disk Allocation shows NORMAL, it points all tracks to the proper Audio Files folder within the Session Folder. YET, only half the audio files (well, actually less than half) are actually there…the others are on a random drive ON WHICH WE HAVE NEVER EVER RECORDED AUDIO in a folder with the proper session name and inside of that, a single folder named “Audio Files” which contains the other files that we recorded ALL ON THE SAME DAY. So, SOMEWHERE DURING OUR 8-HOUR SESSION, somehow the files were directed elsewhere. I must say, having used PT for years now after starting on Sound Tools back in the 1990′s, and owning a D-Control, HD5 Accel, Waves Mercury, etc etc, this is a weird one, and I have no explanation for it. I totally appreciate everyone’s suggestions, and as Rail pointed out, I’ll never copy via the Finder ever again. And I’m going to learn about the things others have suggested upthread. But still, something had to make this happen, and I have NO idea what it is/was.
‘DigiTechSupt’ then asked….
If you drag and drop an audio file from a different drive and do not have ‘automatically copy on import’ preference enabled, it will keep the audio file at it’s original location and play it from there. Were all these files recorded in the session or were some imported? Now, is it possible that round robin was enabled at any point? What is the nature of this other drive – how do you know for certain that audio was never recorded to it? Was the drive ever used to move a session from one place to another, possibly to another computer? If you go to the Regions bin and ‘show full path names’ – do the audio files path indicate anything about how the audio might have ended up on that drive? Was the drive name ever changed? Was there a session template used and, if so, does the template possibly have incorrect drive allocation?
‘johnnyv’ replied…
Digi, thanks for taking an interest. Let me check into your questions and try to answer them accurately (can’t do it right now, as I’m working at the moment). To be honest about Round Robin, I never even knew about that until this issue popped up and one of my assistants looked at the setting (it was not checked). We only installed PT8 about two weeks prior to that session, and perhaps you can answer whether or not RR is “ON” by default when installing PT8 fresh for the first time on a fresh drive with fresh system, etc. I can say that the drive that this went on is a backup drive which only holds my BFD (drum software) files, and some weeks back, I copied my entire PT7 system drive onto that drive just so I had a backup in case anything ever went wrong. But, as far as I know (and I’m the main one in that room), we have NEVER ON A SINGLE OCCASION used that drive as any sort of a PT recording drive…that’s just another weird element to this. I have a Mac 8-core Harpertown with 4 internals…we record PT onto two of those internals…this drive was an external drive which happened to be hooked to the system in case we needed BFD files. I’ll report more later…
‘smlworld’ suggested…
I cannot recommend these ‘videos’ highly enough. Browser relinking is covered and all prefs are discussed in detail. As a long time PT user (back to SD2) I really appreciate Kenny’s command of Pro Tools.
‘DigiTechSupt’ asked….
If there’s some way we can get a concrete example of this occurring outside of user error, obviously we’d want to get it fixed. I’ve tried personally to make this occur on several occasions, replicating customer setups as closely as possible, but without success. If you see this occur, please note everything about the current state of your system, plus anything prior to the incident that you can recall, even if it seems irrelevant.
‘studiojimi’ posted their experiences….
I had an issue like this over the weekend and I thought I had lost my guitarist’s overdubs because they weren’t on the drive Ii was using and i had not noticed that my back up drive was online during the session and some of my templates tracks were still allocated to the BU drive because it used to be my internal. I recently purchased a terra drive and now that’s inside I was lucky that the session at least put the new info in fresh rogue folders– probably because the old backup sessions were in a project folder of their own…otherwise i would have been hosed because I had dragged and dropped to the BU drive in that project folder when backing up. I usually manually back up the files by date and the fade files and the old sessions and backup sessions as well as the audio but as you guys know sometimes when you are tired or distracted…you do a walk away and …. hmmmm that could have been a disaster.
I feel very lucky cuz I had already called the client to tell him I had lost the files…then…miraculously I found them in those new rogue folders….and I named that a blessing immediately.
‘soundboy35′ asked….
So any ideas? I’m curious about this as well. While we’re on the topic of templates being the possible culprit, if I open a template and create a new session from drive A, then save it to drive B, and change the disk allocation to drive B, is this problem going to happen?
‘rinky’ added…
This weirdness also happened to me. I noticed that my sessions were gradually taking longer to process fades and audiosuite edits. Come to find out, my main system drive had some of the fade/audio files on it. I checked the disk allocation and sure enough, some files were being written on my system drive and some on my original 7200 rpm external drive! No idea when it started to do that since I hadn’t made any changes to prefs or to external drives… just snuck up on me! But ever since this problem my edits have been to a grind claiming that my my hard drive isn’t fast enough, etc. even after correcting the disk allocation issue. So guys, you are not alone on this.
‘DigiTechSupt’ asked…
For us to make any kind of real traction on this, we’re going to need details about the history of a session
Which drive it was created on?
How was the session created (File>New Session, from a template, etc)
Are you using the File>New Session>From a Template function, or opening a Pro Tools Session file (by double clicking or otherwise) as your template?
Did you use any custom disk allocation at any point
Was round robin ever enabled?
If you moved the session at any point how did you do it (drag and drop, backup utility, etc)?
Did you ever use Save Copy In to make a copy of the session and, if so, did you copy all audio files? Which drive did you save it to?
Is the preference to automatically import audio to the audio files folder enabled or disabled?
The more detail you can give, the easier it will be to determine what may be going wrong.
‘timragnur’ responded…
I’ve been talking with 3 colleagues of mine who has, like me, experienced this very problem. To be excact, it have occured with sessions that were made in one place, then moved (Finder, drag-and-drop) to another computer. Then, what you record/consolidate/audiosuite from this place will be put in another available harddiscs, sometimes the internal, sometimes the external. A session folder will be made in the root with the new audio files and fade files only. Obviously when you move the session, files will be missing. They were all originally made in PT HD 7.3 (new, not templates), but problems occured long after it was opened/saved with PT HD 8.0 No changes was made in the Disc Allocation, and all links appeared fine refering to the right folder. It doesn’t necessarily occur again within a troubled session. Save Copy In was not used. I know this might create a confusion, but like one wrote earlier in this thread, in the last 2-3 years using PT HD 7.3 i’ve had this problem maybe 5 times (with same kind of random choice harddisc allocation). Knowing the system very well, I think we are talking about a bug getting bigger with version 8.0.
‘Sean Russell’ also suggested this possible work round….
Change every drive you don’t need in the session to ‘T’. That solves the Disk Allocatin weirdness.
‘TimNielsen’ added….
I just want to chime in here too and say I have had this problem before as well. I have also had on many occassions, fade files that will regenerate in their ‘original’ location where they were first built, even though I have all my tracks set properly in Disk Allocation. Like, if I delete all my fades, then relaunch the session, a bunch of the fades will still redraw on the wrong drive. The only solution I found in those cases was to quit PT, take that drive off-line, delete all fades and open the session. When PT can’t find that drive it wants, then it would seem to follow disk allocation properly. I have also had the very wonky issue with PT8 where upon importing session data, tracks, and telling PT to ‘copy’ the audio, that PT will get some random part of the way through, and then just ‘reference’ the rest of them. If you aren’t watching the progress bar, and don’t see it ‘jump’ to the end, you would have never known. As far as I know, this is still present in PT8.03cs2. I now have to check upon every import that PT copied the audio. About 1 in 5 times, it will copy ‘some’ and reference the rest. It’s a disastrous bug that really screwed me several times until I realized what was going on. Save Copy In does seem to work, I haven’t had it miss any files so far. But importing session data seems still buggy. Just posting because maybe these are all somehow related.
Well I must agree that I have experienced situations when folders with some audio files or fade files folders have started to appear on other drives, but I have always found it to be due to Disk Allocation to be set to ‘the other drive’ Even for fade files. I completely agree with ‘DigiTechSupt’ that you must be very careful when moving sessions from one drive to another especially when using the Finder. The safest way to move sessions is to use the Save Session Copy, but who wants to boot up Pro Tools to move a session from one drive to another when you can drag and drop from the Finder?
The workround that ‘Sean Russell’ and ‘carlos santana’ should work but I would find it very difficult to keep switching drives from R to T in the Workspace Browser depending on what session I was working on.
The suggestion from ‘audiogeekzine’ to get to know the Copy and Relink feature is very well made and one that I have posted about here too.
I agree with ‘smlworld’ and cannot recommend Kenny’s videos highly enough.
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