erasing unused space

[dream5695]

I know this has been dealt with before, but I've tried all the others, most of them are outdated...it's just one of those annoying things that I'd like to get sorted...there must be a way...a simple solution...I have 30 or so bars at the end of a session, I wanna delete this space...I have cleared all automation and there is no midi, audio or anything else in these 30 odd bars...why can't I simply remove them....highlite and delete sounds good...but no...won't happen and I don't wanna go down the consolidate route either! There must be some gurus out there who can offer a simple solution...

[Dism]

Originally Posted by dream5695

I know this has been dealt with before, but I've tried all the others, most of them are outdated...it's just one of those annoying things that I'd like to get sorted...there must be a way...a simple solution...I have 30 or so bars at the end of a session, I wanna delete this space...I have cleared all automation and there is no midi, audio or anything else in these 30 odd bars...why can't I simply remove them....highlite and delete sounds good...but no...won't happen and I don't wanna go down the consolidate route either! There must be some gurus out there who can offer a simple solution...

I'm not quite sure what your problem is here...

Are you saying you have 30 bars left at the end of a song? Or there are 30 bars left after the audio in the session?

If it's the latter... how is it affecting your session? You can have a 2 hour long session with a 2 minute song and you can bounce just the 2 minutes. The session length is irrelevant to the length of the material.

[cwsand]

I've had this same problem before. I think it's the result of having audio or midi data that may have been cut to make the song shorter, but for some reason Pro Tools thinks the song is still the original length. IIRC, you can try going to the insert/cut time window, select the bars you want to cut and then cut them - I would select the second option to cut everything. Hope that works!

[albee1952]

or if this is a bounce issue(where you don't want to go back and trim the final file for length) you could pick any audio track that runs from start to finish, consolidate this one track, and select it when you do your bounce(the bounced file will be that exact length).

[dream5695]

Thanks for the feedback....no it's not a Bounce issue....it's easy to highlite the bars you want in the song and Bounce them...you get just what you want....I guess it's more of an aesthetic thing.....try it yourself...open a new session.....create a few tracks, one of them an instrument track....assign an instrument...in my case Strike....place a midi note in the Midi Edit window...click play and let Pro Tools play the loop....I do this to get the tempo right for a song by playing a guitar along to the kit, better than a click-track!!! Now, Pro Tools may go on for a 100 bars before you stop the drums....then try getting rid of all those bars....you end up with a [bleep][bleep][bleep][bleep] load of space that you don't want....you should be able to just highlite them and delete....as I said before....I can usually find a way to do most things but this has just stump me....maybe there is no way....because as you say....it doesn't matter how much clear space there is at the end of a session....it makes no diffrence when doing the Final Bounce....it's just a matter of tidying things up....why have to highlite the bars you want, why not tidy things up, beginning and end....and Bounce??

[cwsand]

Did you try what I suggested? That usually works for me. The biggest annoyance for me with this issue was when zooming - it messes up the whole zoom scheme.

[zoff]

Originally Posted by cwsand

Did you try what I suggested? That usually works for me. The biggest annoyance for me with this issue was when zooming - it messes up the whole zoom scheme.

I'm not the OP, but I have (I think) the same problem. I have a session that has 1 minute of audio but the timeline is 82 minutes long, don't know how it got that way. Zooming would be much easier if I could get rid of the extra space. I've tried the Cut Time window but it doesn't seem to do anything.

[Dism]

There's nothing to do in the timeline if you want to shorten it.

Check out preferences. You can set the timeline length in there.

[dream5695]

Yer..tried everything...gonna give up on this one....if you click the bottom right + sign, Pro Tools will just zoom out and create 100's more bars....when yer zoom in....it still leaves the odd 60 bars at the end of ALL yer work....you can't zoom in or out to just leave what you've done....there are always empty bars to scroll to.....I've worked with other sequencers far less powerfull than PT and yer can tidy things up just right.....maybe PT don't see this as a priority....heh...but thanks for the offerings....much appreciated

[grendizer]

i like this idea!(provided, i understood you correctly) if the song ends at bar 80, there should be an option to lock PT up the timeline from bar 1 to bar 80. in other words, if you zoom all the way out, your window would look bar 1<------------->80 full view.

theres many times where i zoom scrolled out to fast and ended up at bar 376 somewhere. and im like " wth is this? whered my song go?"