Track won't reincorporate even though I have file

[harrymwood]

Hello,

I'm working in a Pro Tools session and every time I close it out and re-open, even with it saved, it grays out one of my tracks. I'm in the re-linking file window and I have the exact file pulled up, but it won't reincorporate it. Is there something I'm doing wrong here? How do I get the file to be recognized?

[daeron80]

For starters, get all those files off the boot drive. That may not be the problem, but Pro Tools doesn't generally like reading audio from a desktop folder. Put them in the Audio Files folder of your session.

Second, that file might have lost its original ID (through being opened in a different program, for instance, or because of a disk error). Tell it to do a find based solely on the filename. Once it's relinked, select it on the timeline and press Shift+Option+3 to duplicate it in place.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by daeron80

For starters, get all those files off the boot drive. That may not be the problem, but Pro Tools doesn't generally like reading audio from a desktop folder. Put them in the Audio Files folder of your session.

He has got a recent MacBook Pro. The boot drive is likely the very best place for audio files. Once the underlying drive is fast enough, wether somebody wants to manage session folders or not on their Desktop really should not be relevant.

[daeron80]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

He has got a recent MacBook Pro. The boot drive is likely the very best place for audio files. Once the underlying drive is fast enough, wether somebody wants to manage session folders or not on their Desktop really should not be relevant.

That's news to me. Not working from the boot drive has been recommended practice for decades. Did Avid release a statement rescinding it? I know that the current Reference Guide says, "Although Pro Tools lets you record to your system drive, this is generally not recommended." (p 459). That's a less stern warning than they used to give a couple years ago. I see your point in principle. But the system is often busy using the boot drive for things in the background, which can make any DAW, and especially Pro Tools, a bit fidgety. It can get you by temporarily, especially with low track counts. But it's best avoided, in my opinion.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by daeron80

That's news to me. Not working from the boot drive has been recommended practice for decades. Did Avid release a statement rescinding it? I know that the current Reference Guide says, "Although Pro Tools lets you record to your system drive, this is generally not recommended." (p 459). That's a less stern warning than they used to give a couple years ago. I see your point in principle. But the system is often busy using the boot drive for things in the background, which can make any DAW, and especially Pro Tools, a bit fidgety. It can get you by temporarily, especially with low track counts. But it's best avoided, in my opinion.

I think you must have been hiding under a rock for a few years? This has been discussed and recommended by lots of folks, including me, on DUC for years. How do you think so many people work on modern MacBook Pros etc? Avid’s advice on this is terribly out of date, and blatantly ridiculous given the performance of modern internal PCIe SSDs, especially when most dedicated audio drives that people are likely to use if blindly following Avid’s advice will result in worse performance than running everything off the boot drive. I have pointed out to Avid all this doc being wrong multiple times, sadly that may have only resulted in the weasel word changes, I have been asking them to differentiate advice for Fast PCIe SSD storage for quite a while... no action at all there.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by daeron80

Not working from the boot drive has been recommended practice for decades.

Yes it was; back then the read/write performance of a drive was measured in tens of megabytes per second, now well over a thousand. And the bigger bottleneck of latency used to be in the ballpark of 5 milliseconds whereas latency of a SSD is in microseconds -- a 1000x difference.

[daeron80]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

I think you must have been hiding under a rock for a few years?

Heh. Well, I did avoid the DUC for a while starting about 10 years ago. I kept up with the top PT blogs, though.

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

How do you think so many people work on modern MacBook Pros etc?

I can't speak for many people, but my coworker uses a MacBook Pro, always reading/writing either to our SAN or to a thunderbolt-connected dedicated SSD. We use our system drives for quick and dirty dialogue editing and that sort of thing. But we don't depend on them. If they work, great. But I'm a little skeptical that a drive of any speed is really adequate for multitrack audio while it's in use by the system.

[Darryl Ramm]

No system drive is "in use by the system" in any way enough that affects a modern PCIe SSD drive. You can run the OS off these drives, stream VI samples, and run a large session---all at the same time on the same drive. The OS is not doing anything to that disk like heavy VI sample streaming does,.... and that's possible with disk cache disabled, enable it and there is so much excess perfroamcen capability. Is there a limit, sure, not one that most folks will ever find.

This started to change with PCIe SSD, several years back, the first ones were 2 x PCIe 2 lanes. Current ones are 4 x PCIe 3 lanes and use NVMe for more efficiency. So totally different than any HDD or even SATA SSD.

And those Thunderbolt connected SSD... unless Thunderbolt 3 with 4 x PCIe 3 lanes they will be significantly slower than writing to the boot drive on a modern MacBook Pro. Lots of "thunderbolt" drives, even SSDs, are internally SATA III and so bottleneck ~ 500MB/sec when a 4 x PCIe 3 lane SSD should deliver > 2,500 MB/s read. There are lots of good reasons to use external drives, for extra space, and organization, and backup options, etc. but with lots of these current computers *performance* is not one of them, on modern systems you can easily actually harm performance by going to external storage devices.