locust_tree
12-11-2014, 12:53 AM
Hello all. I'm often receiving sessions from PTHD studios in the area, some with wildly different I/O than mine. Most of them are on Mac, I'm on W7, running regular PT10.
When I open these sessions and click on any given track's outputs, the outputs list is inevitably littered with as many as 50 italicized dead paths from the other studio. It was never a problem for me as a lot of my recent work was ITB - as long as I could select my main stereo outs I was happy.
However I now have a big OTB mix session coming up and it's become necessary to use a custom .pio file I've created. My own I/O setup is a little unusual - I have a console I use for mixing and summing only. A patch bay wasn't in the budget :o so the 26 Analog Outs are hardwired right to the console's tape returns. Tracking is done the same as most ITB studios; pres to converters right into PT. So my I/O setup needs to show converter names on the input side, and console channels on the output side, as stereo pairs with the option of clearly labeled mono sub-paths (i.e. a mono track sent to the first channel of the console reads Console 1, not Console 1-2 L).
My .pio file accomplishes this without a hitch. Today I wanted to test it by creating a blank session, and choosing my .pio file in the Session Parameters window. (The 10.3 manual, by the way, is completely wrong about this. It will tell you to save .pio files to Program Files/Common Files/Avid/DAE/IO Settings, but on my system no such directories existed past the Avid folder. The correct path ended up being Program Files (x86)/Avid/Pro Tools/DAE/IO Settings. Not even close. Is this something to do with my PT11 co-install?) Anyway, my IO file works great when opening a blank session. My ins and outs show up exactly as I want them, with labels that make sense to me.
The fun begins when trying to get this to happen on a session that has been within farting distance of another studio. I could go into the session by hand and scrub it clean of any reference to any physical output whatsoever, I'm talking all tracks offline, no channels or buses assigned anywhere external, no audio leaving Pro Tools in any way. I could then go into the I/O window and delete every path in all three tabs, replacing each one with the settings from my own IO file. It doesn't matter. As soon as I hit "ok", 4 or 5 output buses get remapped to bogus paths and italicized - sometimes with names from the other studio, other times with names from previous iterations of MY setup which I haven't used for years.
The strangest thing is that if I go back into I/O Setup, import my settings from the file again, Delete Unused Paths when prompted, and get it looking as it should... upon pressing ok, another 4 or 5 get remapped to dead outs. The remapping happens completely at random. It's never the same set of outputs twice and there is no means by which I can get all output buses online. Whether I remap them by hand, or just load the proper mappings from the file, 4 or 5 will go dead right after clicking OK.
How am I supposed to get rid of bogus output paths I can't see? It's not like these italicized outputs are showing up in the outputs tab so they can't be deleted. I have always had "Sessions Overwrite Current I/O Setup" unchecked (boy there's a PT feature that doesn't live up to its name).
This touches on a larger issue I've had with Pro Tools which is severe ambiguity between session and global settings, but for now I just want my IO back. My gut feeling is that this is a bug.
When I open these sessions and click on any given track's outputs, the outputs list is inevitably littered with as many as 50 italicized dead paths from the other studio. It was never a problem for me as a lot of my recent work was ITB - as long as I could select my main stereo outs I was happy.
However I now have a big OTB mix session coming up and it's become necessary to use a custom .pio file I've created. My own I/O setup is a little unusual - I have a console I use for mixing and summing only. A patch bay wasn't in the budget :o so the 26 Analog Outs are hardwired right to the console's tape returns. Tracking is done the same as most ITB studios; pres to converters right into PT. So my I/O setup needs to show converter names on the input side, and console channels on the output side, as stereo pairs with the option of clearly labeled mono sub-paths (i.e. a mono track sent to the first channel of the console reads Console 1, not Console 1-2 L).
My .pio file accomplishes this without a hitch. Today I wanted to test it by creating a blank session, and choosing my .pio file in the Session Parameters window. (The 10.3 manual, by the way, is completely wrong about this. It will tell you to save .pio files to Program Files/Common Files/Avid/DAE/IO Settings, but on my system no such directories existed past the Avid folder. The correct path ended up being Program Files (x86)/Avid/Pro Tools/DAE/IO Settings. Not even close. Is this something to do with my PT11 co-install?) Anyway, my IO file works great when opening a blank session. My ins and outs show up exactly as I want them, with labels that make sense to me.
The fun begins when trying to get this to happen on a session that has been within farting distance of another studio. I could go into the session by hand and scrub it clean of any reference to any physical output whatsoever, I'm talking all tracks offline, no channels or buses assigned anywhere external, no audio leaving Pro Tools in any way. I could then go into the I/O window and delete every path in all three tabs, replacing each one with the settings from my own IO file. It doesn't matter. As soon as I hit "ok", 4 or 5 output buses get remapped to bogus paths and italicized - sometimes with names from the other studio, other times with names from previous iterations of MY setup which I haven't used for years.
The strangest thing is that if I go back into I/O Setup, import my settings from the file again, Delete Unused Paths when prompted, and get it looking as it should... upon pressing ok, another 4 or 5 get remapped to dead outs. The remapping happens completely at random. It's never the same set of outputs twice and there is no means by which I can get all output buses online. Whether I remap them by hand, or just load the proper mappings from the file, 4 or 5 will go dead right after clicking OK.
How am I supposed to get rid of bogus output paths I can't see? It's not like these italicized outputs are showing up in the outputs tab so they can't be deleted. I have always had "Sessions Overwrite Current I/O Setup" unchecked (boy there's a PT feature that doesn't live up to its name).
This touches on a larger issue I've had with Pro Tools which is severe ambiguity between session and global settings, but for now I just want my IO back. My gut feeling is that this is a bug.