Recording and Ooops question OVERLAPPING REGIONS

[punchiest]

I recently switched from Cubase to Protools.

In Cubase, if I have a track already recorded, and by accident (because of a record bus accidentally initiated or something like that during a series of punch ins while on another track with the same rec input initialized) I record over it, I can recover it easily.

OK...that sounded confusing...

Say on track 10 I have finished vocals, all comped and awesome!
Then on track 42 when I am doing guitar solos, by accident, I armed the recording bus on 10 and striped over it whilst doing guitars on 42.
Since track 10 is so far out of the field of view on the monitor...I never realize what I am doing until it is too late and I have a killer guitar solo recorded on 42.....and now on track 10 I guess.....OVER MY VOCALS!!


So far, I have noticed that if you record something over something in Protools...unless you happen to be within your undos and you can live without the awesome stuff you did while making that mistake...you are screwed. The audio and all your edits are just friggin' gone....buh-bye. The guitar player throws something at your computer and your tower catches on fire. After that, the label asks for a refund on all the studio time since your harddrive burned in the fire.


In Cubase, with the same scenario, on track 10, the new regions (objects) would appear in a darker color than the others on the same track. This indicates that there is audio below it. Cubase just plays the audio on the top (visible) layer of the track. I can then begin peeling away at the layers til I am at the layer, in this case, the bottom layer (my original track)...all comped and beautiful.
My body at that point begins to relax and I can continue my session slowly wiping the small amount of sweat I had when I realized my booboo. However, due to the whole layer thing, my guitar player never knows what happened no fire, no refund, and everybody gets a coffee.



Where is this option in Protools?
Does such an animal exist?



If not, can someone at Digidesign put that incredibly awesome and useful feature?

I really hope this software has that feature or someway similar to be able to recall your tracks. Not only is it useful for fixing mistakes (even days after making them) but also for doing some easy comping since you can spread that overlayed/overlapped stuff in lanes to see what you are doing. I refuse to believe the industry standard does not have a feature that works as well as this.

Can someone please help? I have not actually made this mistake on a session yet...I just noticed it during one of my many "does Protools do this?" tests.

Thanks

[AfterJohn]

Pro Tools never gets rid of audio...unless you press Apple - Period (.) while you are recording or you go to the audio bin and delete it.

If there are still pieces of the track after you get rid of the accidental punches, use the trimmer tool to pull the region back to its original state.

[punchiest]

That is an obvious fix.

I am talking about a track that has already been comped and edited. You cannot do that (slide the audio back), because it would not contain your edits.

I do not have it on destructive record mode either.

Thanks for replying.

[albee1952]

If your vocal(the track you messed up) was consolidated(so it was a single audio file), find the splice between the tail of good audio and the last piece of recorded blank, use the smart tool and place it on the "good" side of the splice so it turns into the [ symbol, and drag that edge back to the beginning of the track. All your vocal should be restored(now if it was chopped up into several small regions, this will only restore the rest of the region you are dragging. As said, all the audio is still in the regions bin, so you might be able to restore each region by spotting it(a little deeper into editing than my skills will help on). BTW, if you comped the vocal from a bunch of playlists, all the hidden playlists will still be available for rebuilding the comp.

[BobbyDazzler]

I think you're screwed on this one!
The easiest way out would be to undo all your guitar takes until your vocal is back, then re-import the guitar wavs(they'll be in the audio folder) and use spot mode to put them back where they were dropped in. (ooops..albee said the same thing)

On the other hand you could learn to be more careful where you record :)

[Noiselab]

Don't forget the possibility of going into your session backup folder and pulling up the session as it appeared while you were working on that track. That has saved my butt on several occasions. It may not work for all cases (deleted regions from the regions list, etc), but I've been a happy camper when it has worked.

If your region files are still intact on your audio drive, the session backup file is sometimes the fastest way to recover your work.

NL

[punchiest]

I thank everyone for the answers on this.

The same question is posted in the HD forum.

(I own both and I wanted to see if this was some sort of thing that only HD users can do...or something like that)

There are some answers there as well..but so far...nothing about a feature like this available. The conversation has gotten pretty deep there, so checking out the thread in the HD forum can also give ideas on at least what does not work.

I would think that this is a feature that people would want. Anyone that has come from the Cubase, Sonar, Samplitude, DP, Vegas world will tell you that it does not happen like that over there.

No matter what, I have found that the overall audio quality is superior in Protools, but wow...I wish some of these bells and whistles were here too.