Grep for Pro Tools sessions?

[SpookyGranzo]

Ok, it's an obscure ancient Unix reference...but grep was a nifty program that found instances of a search string in a group of text files. Very handy back in the days of writing code with line-oriented text editors etc. But I digress!

Pro-Tools-managed-and-created Game Audio. MIDI and live Music, "stingers", fx of all shapes & sizes, voiceover. One big project, LOTS of sub-directories and separate sessions, and I thought I was doing pretty well keeping it all organized...until someone said "we need another button sound kind of like those button sounds you made 6 weeks ago."

I went to where I thought that session was...and I found the bounced-out audio file that contained the button sounds. BUT I CAN'T find the Pro Tools session that contains a reference to the Reason (I think) synth I used to MAKE the sound, OR the MIDI data that played that synth, or even the result audio file in the clip list!

What I know is, SOME Pro Tools session's bounce command, produced that audio file...and my standard practice is to re-import that file (it contains a half-dozen individual clips) and cut it up, then bounce out the individual assets that are used in the game -- those individual pieces I do NOT re-import to the session.

Bottom line: can anybody think of a way to search a directory tree full of Pro Tools sessions for a REFERENCE IN THE CLIP LIST to that intermediate audio file or a region there-of?

If you're still reading, Thanks!

[Darryl Ramm]

There are lot of ways to hacks at this that *might* work. A possible trivial and but far from perfect example on OS X is...

find ~/Documents -name 'WaveCache.wfm' -exec /bin/bash -c "echo for \"{}\" ; strings \"{}\" | grep 'Wet Guitar'" \;

This example searches under my private Documents folder for all WaveCache.wfm files and extracts the clip names (just strings in that file) and searches for one called 'Wet Guitar'. This of course relies on the WaveCache.wfm file being present and up to date (that file stores the waveform rendering in the session). This example is not pretty, requires the user to look though the list of files for the found name but for a few minutes effort it gives an idea of how to do this. It would be straight forward to script this much better using other utilities (nawk, python, etc.).

If you are on Windows,... get yourself a Mac, or cygwin or power shell (yuk).

Of course things are easy if the file name exists in the audio folder, just search for that...

Darryl