Copying sections (songs) of a session

[agent525]

I have tracks that were recorded live and imported into my Pro Tools Ultimate. How do I go about copying certain sections of the session and creating individual songs. I have one long session made up of 2 hours or so of songs that I want to breakout into individual songs and bounce them down and record as individual songs.

Can someone help me?

Thanks,
Al

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by agent525

I have tracks that were recorded live and imported into my Pro Tools Ultimate. How do I go about copying certain sections of the session and creating individual songs. I have one long session made up of 2 hours or so of songs that I want to breakout into individual songs and bounce them down and record as individual songs.

Can someone help me?

Thanks,
Al

There's a couple of ways you might do this. One is to use the selector tools to select the part you want. Delete the other bits you don't want, and then do a "Save As" and give the session a new name. That will preserve the original session as is, and give you a new session.


Another way would be to select the bit you want and then copy them to their own tracks. Do a Save As of that session. then, create a new session with the new name you want, and then use import session data on the new session, and import the tracks you want. The benefit of doing it this way is the new session will be in its own folder along with any new tracks you create.



If I were doing it, I'd probably do it the second way so I'd have a separate session for the individual song.

[agent525]

I cant get this to work any other thoughts?

[albee1952]

2 suggestions from someone that has done this before:
#1-go delete the duplicate thread you started and continue this one(oh well...too late)
#2-don't chop it up into separate songs. I did that and ended up pasting everything back together and probably doubled my work

The thing about a live show is, it really wants to exist as a continuous string of music. Add to that, that the overall treatment of most instruments is likely to remain consistent. How you deal with things that need attention on a per-song basis is(my opinion) best done with simple automation. Some of my tracks(mostly guitars) required different EQ for some songs, so I simply inserted 2 or 3 EQ plugins and bypassed whichever EQ was not needed for a particular song.

As for effects, I often wanted different delays or reverbs, so my solution there was to create multiple AUX tracks, but feed all the vocal FX with the same send/bus, all the drum reverbs with the same bus, etc...and either mute or automate the AUX track levels so the desired effects appeared for each song(and all vocal effects would be pulled down for any in-between-song talking to the audience).

Once the entire show plays as you want, you have options for bouncing out. Mine was to drop markers at the very start of each song. Then I would select from marker to marker and bounce each song(doing this allows the audio files to be placed end to end in the CD burning program so there were no blank areas between song playback. Another option is to bounce the entire show as a single audio file(that fits on a DVD, or, split into 2 60-minute files for burning onto 2 CD's. Most any CD-authoring program will allow you to drop track markers at the start of each song, even if you burn a single audio file for the entire show(I know Wavelab does as that's what I used).

One more reason to keep the entire show together is that audience tracks will remain continuous(without gaps) though you will likely want to lower their level while songs play(and ride them up for the song endings).