PTLE 6.7 and older PT sessions

[lwilliam]

I had originally upgraded from 5.2 to 6.4 when I got my 002R and had tested loading 5.3 sessions into 6.4 and had no problems. I also moved from a G4 to my dual G5. I did the 6.4 to 6.7 upgrade a couple of months ago without any further thought of backwards compatibility.

Well, I had a really bad day today: A client who had me master a CD of his last year came in and wanted to redo a couple of edits on the CD. "No problem", I said.

However, it appears that 6.7 doesn't recognize my old 5.2 sessions, whereas 6.4 did. Did I miss something? Was this documented somewhere? I'm SOL with this client if I can't open my 5.2 sessions (which I copied to a USB backup drive some months ago).

Did something go wrong in the file transfer to the external drive, from OS9 to OSX, or does 6.7 really not recognize those sessions?

[Rail Jon Rogut]

6.7 should be able to open all previous sessions. Check the session file integrity.

Rail

[Avid]

6.7 should be able to open all previous sessions.

Definitely should, and pro Tools 5.1 and later should be able to open a Pro Tools 6.x session.
http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/session.cfm

Try creating a new session on your mac, and use the File > Import Session Data command to copy the contents of the original session, including all audio files.

[lwilliam]

First, I got it working as everyone above said it should. The PTLE 5.2.2 files opened up just fine in 6.7 - the first time asking me about the different i/o (001 vs 002), the +6 vs +12, the i/o setup, and the file locations. Those kinds of things would be expected.

However, someone else may run into this so I thought I'd share it.

1. I had copied my G4/OS9 PTLE 5.2.2 files onto an external Maxtor hard drive connected via USB 1.1 which had been formatted with OS9. I tested the transfer by simply loading the session from the (too slow) external drive and at least the session loaded fine: The G4 could read the files back and run them in PTLE just fine.
2. I take the external drive and plug it into the G5/OSX Mac, mount the disk and copy the files to a partition on the OSX drive. OSX then ONLY recognizes the PTLE session file as a "Unix Executable File" and has a black icon attached to the session file. The sdii files in the "Audio Files" folder also come across with a black icon instead of the iTunes icon. Pretty weird, huh? I don't know why, and it's repeatable as I did it twice. Maybe it's something with the USB 1.1 protocol? or maybe something to do with the G4 or G5 USB chipset?

How I got it to work just fine was to network the two Macs with a standard Cat 5 Ethernet cable and Appletalk. I turned file sharing on with the G4 and mounted the G4 hard drive on my G5 desktop and copied the files directly to my G5 partition. No muss, no fuss. I REALLY wish I had known it was this easy.