Audiosuite individual files needs to include fades

[Farmer Dave]

Am I missing something? I hope so.

Lets say we have a number of regions selected, with head & tail fades.

1) We select the "Duplicate" audiosuite plug-in.
2) Select the individual file, and region by region, options.
3) Hit process.

The result is a bunch of individual files, as we expect and want, BUT, each of the fades is also an individual file.

I want it to work like it does when you choose "Entire selection", but ignore the space between regions/files. This way, we can optimize our sessions & make them more portable, much easier.

If there is a head and/or tail fade, they should be ignored as a separate region when performing this. Ignored as a SEPARATE region, but included in the file they are attached to.


Here's another example of how it doesn't work the way it ought to.

Same as above but, choose "Normalize". Now, the head & tail fades are normalized, but they are only referencing their own level, so they are both WAY too loud, and are no longer sonically connected to the original file.

[This message has been edited by Farmer Dave (edited April 05, 2001).]

[Noiz2]

When you use "individual files" every region (including fades) becomes its own file. Always was this way ...probably make more sence to have fades conected but thats not the way PT does fades. PT creates seperate "fade files" so it doesnt have to destructivly edit the source. Now many DAWs do esentialy a Vol graph fade ... but then you would be in a simular bind because the AS PIs dont record vol changes.
SK

[Farmer Dave]

I realize this is the way it's been, I was just hoping there was a way to accomplish the task that I was unaware of.

I expect there will be a lot of work to do, to change the AS architecture to make it include the fades, but I hope DIGI will recognize the value. How can processing the fades as separate files possibly be something useful, especially in the "Normalize" example.

Maybe doing away with fades is the way to go, but again, a major reconstruction of PT.

The benefit would be enormous, at least to me. I imagine the feature would get a lot of use, if it were implemented.

Having the ability to select the entire session, and do a "Duplicate", to save off all the files as new, but JUST what's being used, would make life so much easier in session portability, and pertinent file backups much less costly.

Some might say that it does that now, but I maintain that having 3 files (fade in, body, fade out), where there should be one (fades & body combined), is not acceptable, since it would become too difficult to edit reliably. If you don't select all 3 files to move them, then there's no way to find what fade is attached to which file. At that point the session is screwed.

I suppose we can select each file manually & duplicate, but that is very time consuming, so defeats the purpose.

In other uses, DIGI already understands that fades are considered part of the whole file. If you select a file that has head &/or tail fades, then all 3 regions select, and they say you can't move a fade without it's accompanying region.

I hope this is argument enough to have work done on the AS code.

[Noiz2]

Sorry for answering you like you were new to PT... some how I didn't see it was you. I agree totaly, I do a lot of taking big files and making smaller ones general clean up etc. and it would be a great time saver if there were some option that would recognize all conected reigons as a single entity for AS prossesing. There is no way that I know of curently to do this. A kludgy work around is to bounce, strip scilence then export selected. But that is only a time saver in a very few cases and you end up bouncing twice. It has it's uses when you want to prosses a bunch of files the same way because you can use TDM instead of multiple AS steps.
SK

[Farmer Dave]

Another suggestion along these lines, and I know this will make the programmers cringe.......

This would only apply to "Duplicate":

1) Include the fades in the whole, as suggested in the above posts.
2) Ignore regions that are "Whole Files". (This to avoid making dupes of files that haven't been altered.)

**** I guess this should be one option,the other being to make new complete files even if they are whole files (so all session files get written to the same place).****

Thanks DIGI for considering this valuable feature.

I hope some more folks will chime in on this, as everyone I've asked about this loves the idea, and considers the "region by region" functionality not useful, since the way it handles fades. I know I'm not alone in wanting this. Anyone that does FX, and delivers drives to the mix, would want this, if only to protect their SFX library (The entire underlying file then doesn't go to the stage, only the section(s) that's used.)

[sounddefects]

given the fact that the whole implementation of fade files in PT and the way they work has always been a pain in the butt, this is a request that should have been implemented from the start, not something we should have to beg for. Over the last few months, a couple friends of mine checked out PT for the first time. The one thing (but of course not the only thing) they BOTH complained about was the way fades work. I told them it's not as bad as it seems, you just need to get used to working with PT. Since then I've been noticing how much fades bug me, the kind of things you get numb to after after using a program for a long time.
Bottom line- if you click on a region and it automatically highlights the fades, audiosuite should include all 3 segments as the whole file. Can anyone think of an instance where you would actually WANT to process the fades seperately??

[Pietari Koskinen]

Maybe I am missing something but if you just want to make your sessions smaller and include only used portions of the audio files, there is a way:

1. Open the Audio Files folder of your session
2. Select all audio files and drag them onto the Pro Tools alias icon
3. In Pro Tools, first "Select Unused Regions" (including whole files) - then "Clear Selected" - choose REMOVE option (don't delete)
4. "Save Session Copy In" with "Copy Audio Files" option selected to a different drive
5. Unmount the hard drive where the original session is on (this is optional, but feels safer).
6. Open the new session (Copy of your original session)
7. Select all audio files - "Compact Selected" with some padding. Now you have a consolidated version of your original session. Original audio files are untouched.

That's what I've done many years when archiving sessions. I do agree however that individual file -option in Audiosuite shouldn't treat fade files as individual files.

[Noiz2]

I think there are two seperate issues here. If all you want to do is not have your entire audio file in the onstage session (honestly I think space would be of more concern than security but thats a different topic) then PT already has better options than duplicating everythin with audio suite plugins. But thete are many times when you want to produce a bunch of files from a large one and the only current option is a big time waster and realy makes no sence, there is no reason (from a users point of veiw) thad fades should not be included in the duplicate function.
SK

[charles maynes]

In PT 5.1, there is a difficult-to-get-to but highly useful "Consolidate" feature when importing tracks from other sessions.

In order to prep a stage session, you would need to make a copy of the original, open it, then delete all your audio tracks (and clear the bin)- then, use import tracks to reimport all the finished tracks back into the session.

You would specifically select the option of COPYING the audio, as well as defining a handle length for the incoming regions.

this works pretty well and I did use this feature for "A Knight's Tale" so it is not theoretical.

Of course DigiTranslator will do such things as well. perhaps more elegantly

charles maynes

[Farmer Dave]

>>>>>>>>>>
Yes it will first copy all of them. But if you select all audio files in the copied session and then perform "Compact Selected", then the resulting riccos file includes only the 5 riccos you used in your session.
<<<<<<<<<

Compacting the original files is not an acceptable workaround. I don't want to lose the other 195 riccos, of course, since that's part of my library, and I'll be cutting from that in the future.

Making a separate copy and compacting that, also is not an acceptable workaround. Too many steps, too time comsuming.

CM - The "consolidate" feature is definately in the ballpark, though I'm interested to see how it names files, ie - can you tell what the source file was? (The new AS architecture as of 5.0 does a decent job of naming, maybe this got carried over into "Consolidate".) Thanks for the heads up on that!

[This message has been edited by Farmer Dave (edited April 07, 2001).]