New to Pro Tools...Mixing Tracks?

[SteelCityBorn]

Whats up guys?

I finally decided to step out of my comfort zone and get the Pro-Tools Recording Studio bundle at Best Buy. For about 10-12 years, I have been using Cool Edit Pro for recording and mixing. I loved the ease/simplicity of the program, and after using it for so long, I had it mastered. Now on to Pro Tools Essential:

I record hip-hop music and strictly will be using the program for recording, mixing, EQ, etc. It wasnt much of a task to figure out putting the instrumental into a seperate track and then to record in another track as I always had done in Cool Edit. Here is my problem:

How do I mix the two tracks together and convert it into an mp3 file?

Im so accustomed to Cool Edits "mix paste" function where you would copy the track intended to mix, click on the track you were mixing with, hitting mix paste and VIOLA: a mixed wav ready to be saved. How in the world do I do this on Pro Tools?

The help would be greatly appreciated as I cant seem to figure it out.

Thanks.

[Eric Seaberg]

First of all, even if you don't have a 'paper' manual, there are LOTS of PDF files for documentation which should be in the Digidesign/AVID folder within Applications. Start there...

What you need to do, since you're really going to 'mix' the two tracks using faders, plug-ins, etc., you will be re-recording the mix back into another stereo track on the system. From there you can export to iTunes or whatever and convert to MP3.

It's really all about setting up the MIX DESK to do what you want, and I don't have the space here to get into it. Look in the manual for BOUNCE TO DISK or RECORD TO DISK.

[nst7]

It's easiest to bounce to disc in Wav format and then later convert to MP3 using Itunes.

[Eric Seaberg]

If I'm doing a complex mix, which I can have as many as 105-tracks, I'll mix back into the session on two new tracks (or 6 if I'm doing 5.1). If I hear something I don't like as I'm going along, I can stop, roll back a bit and fix the mix, punch back in from that point on and consolidate the new pieces together as a complete mix. This also confirms that everything remains in sync to picture...very important for me.

Even if you're doing a smaller mix, if only 8-tracks, the option to stop and roll back for a fix is a HUGE time saver.