Best way to break up long session into many files?

[illovich]

I'm sort of a weird PT newbie, in that I've actually been using it for a few years, but only for single track applications (recording a singe voice talking, usually) with very little editing.

My band was about to start recording our next cd (we had used single unit 4-tracks--cassette and a fostex digital before) I pushed the notion of us using my Digi002 and a laptop, and we did.

I had originally figured that we would do an individual session per take, but that proved too unwieldy as I couldn't figure out how to make a template with all our mic settings (we had 7 inputs in our original "basic tracks" takes), so what we ended up doing was recording long multiple take sessions of up to an hour each--thank god disk space is so cheap these days.

So now we're doing overdubs, and we're crashing into a huge problem... namely, that mixing is unwieldy, as different songs and different takes suggest different mixes, plus different songs get different overdubs (accordion here, canasta there) so labeling tracks is getting difficult.

And in our latest session, we opened up one file and the good take had been cut from the timeline. I figured out how to drag the sound files back to the timeline, but then the vocals were out of sync and being a real noob at this I couldn't get them back into sync. Arrrgh.

Ok, let me cut to the chase:

What's the best way to cut this file up into individual songs? I'm using PT LE 6.4.


Thanks in advance for any advice that can be offered.

[asa]

How long is the pause between takes? If the pause between each take is a little long, most importantly, longer than any pause you have within the needed material. You could possibly use "Strip Silence to zero in on those longer pauses and then remove those, and in turn make seperate audio regions of each take. You can also go through and consolidate each take or group of takes into their own region, and then name that region both in Pro Tools and on the hard-disk, simply by double clicking on it in the edit window, then typing the name.

let me know if you need some more info.

[Ducky]

Best thing to do is to break all the songs up into individual sessions. Copy the audio into each session and go to town (not leave, but attach the session setups). Here are a few pointers:
1. you can import tracks from other sessions
2. you can 'save session copy in' to duplicate the session for as many songs as you need
3. you can maually load each audio track as you wish. [yuck]

In the session, group your audio tracks so they do not go out of sync. Now you can move, trim, and snip multiple tracks at a time.

Find the "Consolidate audio region" in the manual and on the Edit menu. This simple duplicates the audio into a new file. CAUTION! Be sure the destructive record is OFF.

Once you have your songs organized, and not until then, start adding the overdubs on separate tracks. and play to your hearts content, one song at a time. Trim, cut, paste, automate, plugins, submixing... all that.

Once you have all the songs how you like them... and the rest of the band, of course, then bounce them to disk and bring them all together into one session. This is your mastering session.
Here you play with final EQ, Compression, limiting, timing/spacing between songs, etc. This should loook like what you want on the final CD.

There are a lot of tools in PTLE to help you make things easier. Review the manual for all the things you have available. As you see that you need something, go to the manual and learn more about it.

As for syncing up two tracks, assuming they start at the same place, you can tell a track exactly where to start. You will find this answer in the Edit Window Overview.

Enjoy your first masterpiece