How big are your songs?

[strata]

I have been working on my first digi cd (eight songs). most of the songs are between 16 and 20 tracks with very few effects on each song (maybe10 effects total per song).

I recorded all of the drums (8 tracks) all the guitars (4 to 6 tracks) and the bass lines (1 or 2 tracks) then did a couple of vocal tracks here and there.

The problem is that I have a 13 gig hard drive and after i recorded all of this stuff i still had 5 or 6 gig left until i let my singer start recording the final vocal tracks. he called me and said that he could not even get the play button to work. I brought the computer home and looked at the file sizes for each song. One song was 2.75GB and a couple others were close to that. These are 3 or 4 minute songs with less than 20 tracks and minimal effects.

I found an IBM internal 40 GB hard drive for 130$ on Egghead.com, but is that normal for a song to take up close to 3 gig?

Let me know what size your songs are getting to so I can be prepared. Thanks for any input you offer.

Strata [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img] [img]images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]

[ReniuR]

That happened to me once, but not to that extent.

I noticed when I went to back up the session, one of the audio files in the session was over a gig, and it was a short song.

I heard of freak things with protools free where it can make one solid audio file that fills the rest of your hard drive in a second.

What's up with that?

[QuikDraw]

I did a project at 48 kHz 24 bit. Most of the sessions had around 18 tracks and averaged about 4 minutes per session. Most of the sessions were between 1 - 1.2 GB. I was able to fit each session on 2 CD-R disks. There were not a whole lot of overdubs or punch-ins, but I did keep almost all takes, and I never cleaned up the sessions.

One of my sessions used 22 tracks, and it still fit on only 2 CD-R disks, so it was less than 1300 MB.

Mike

[mhines]

Hi,
You might try making sure when you record that you are in Destructive record mode. Otherwise everytime you attempt to record, you creat an audio file. In other words, if it takes you 10 attempts at getting a guitar part down on one track, you just created 10 audio files. As you can well imagine you could quickly eat up a hard drive. If you use Destructive Record mode, you will overwrite the previous track everytime you hit the record button. There are also other ways to manage your audio efficiently. You can find that info in the ProTools Help section.

Mike

[ufob]

true dat..
If you right click on the record enable button, you will see that there is a "D" or a "P" that will appear in the center of the circle. If it is set at "D" then all takes will be lost as you record new ones. I had the same problem..I went into my audio regions list and there was about 30 takes of one vocal...The "P" by the way is for punching in. JB

[Mattf]

ReniuR,
I had the same issue with several sessions containing one or two extremely big (a gig or so) audio files in the AudioFiles folder. When I tried to open these files up I got some sort of wav header error.

Turns out it was a bug in PT where if you are recording audio and your system crashes it creates a really big wav. I am not certain but I believe it was fixed since I haven't seen this in awhile.

I would just delete those wavs since they are corrupt (useless) and just taking up precious space on your drive. Of course delete them only after double checking to make sure they are useless. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

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Matt www.mp3.com/thefadingcollection

[Rock_Artist]

16tracks/24bit/48khz.
I count 1second of wave as: 700KB (not accurate but just for the calc).
4minutes:
700 x 4 x 60 x 16 = 268800 / 1024 =2625.
2.6GB.
Most sessions takes between 600MB (8tracks) to 3-4GB (4minutes).
Keep in mind that you have several takes that you're not actually using but takes space.

Backuping Sessions:
I use RAR. Reasons it's might be slow but it's the best. I RAR the entire directory as one archive and split it to volumes at size of CDs I work... 700/650MB. Usually I get the last disc with some space left so I'm able to add and audiotrack with mastered track. Sessions backup takes about 2-3 CDs.
I use additional CRC data for safer backup.