ProTools does not recognize/open new sessions

[ianntobrienn]

Hi guys! I'm new to the forum here but any help you can give me is greatly appreicated and I am forever in your debt. That being said, I transfered computers from one mac to another and ever since I did that my ProTools sessions will not be recognized by the UI and won't open at all. They don't give me an error message or anything, they just won't open at all. I've be importing session data everytime I need to come back to a session but it's really time consuming and I don't have the time to do that anymore and just wanna use ProTools as normal. Has anyone run into this before and if not can anybody please help. Thank you so much.

[Darryl Ramm]

Hi Welcome to DUC

What exactly do you mean by "not be recognized by the UI and won't open at all."

What exactly do you see in the UI? What UI are you talking about--the Finder? or Pro Tools? Or? what exactly do you do, and what exactly do you see then.

Say you copy a session called foo.ptx in a folder called foo to your Documents folder. Then in Pro Tools you should do File>Open>Session and navigate to <user>/Documents/foo and select foo.ptx and click the open button. Is that what you are trying to do? What exactly does not work as you expect? Post screenshots if you can... post on a photo or file sharing site and post the link here. Image attachments on DUC get down sampled so much they are frequently useless.

Are you sure you are trying to open the correct .ptx files for the sessions? You don't have multiple other .ptx files in directories or other directories that you were really using? That can happen easily if File>Save Session variants are used incorrectly.

And some basic info. You are moving from what Pro Tools versions to what? From what macOS versions to what? How did you move the sessions over?

And what filesystem are these sessions on after they are moved? ... especially are they on an external drive or network drive with say a exFAT or NTFS filesystems?

[ianntobrienn]

Hi Darryl,

Sorry for the confusion. When I mean the UI I mean the ProTools UI. Say for instance I was to create a session called Foo. A folder on my desktop will pop up and everything will be in there that should be. It'll say Foo.ptx, audio files, video files, bounced files, backup sessions etc. The second I close the session and I save the session I can't reopen that. If I try and do it through the ProTools UI it'll look like I never even created the session at all. If I try and open it through my desktop and reverse search the file and go to the folder and click on it it won't open. At first I thought I just needed to his Command = because maybe my mix window was hiding but this wasn't the case. The most recent session it thinks I opened was on another computer. Ever since I switched macs ProTools thinks I haven't created a session so something must not be being recognized. If I open a session that I created like say Foo.ptx. It just won't open at all. On testing it if I don't close the app it will recognize Foo.ptx and I can reopen it. However, the second I close the app it has no memory of Foo.ptx in its records. However, if I was to make a new sessions called Foo, it would say a session already exists that is named that and my mac isn't too happy about it. I've never run into anything like this at all, and I have absolutely no idea how to fix this. Thank you so much, you're a life saver for trying to help me.

[ianntobrienn]

I also forgot to mention I'm on a 2023 Macbook Pro, 13.3.0 Ventura and using ProTools Studio 2023.6.0. All the files haven't left my computer also as my storage got upgraded with getting a new computer

[Darryl Ramm]

What exact folder path are you creating the session in? Try your Documents folder (hopefully that's not shared with iCloud, but still should not cause this problem). Or another folder you create on the internal drive (not an external drive--unclear if you might have an external drive).

Is Pro Tools ever crashing? Like when you try to quit from it does it actually save the session and quit correctly or not? Sometimes Pro Tools can actually silently crash rather than exit correctly.

After creating a session and working in it do a File>Close Session and wait until it's clearly closed and you can then try reopening it (i.e. do that test without quitting Pro Tools). Or try then quitting Pro Tools and starting it again and then File>Open>Session.

[ianntobrienn]

Hey Darryl,

Thanks for being my life saver and for bearing with me. I haven't been putting it in documents, I just have a giant folder on my desktop that I usually put all my sessions in and organize them from there. Also I don't use iCloud on my Mac except for contacts but that's never been a problem before for me. For a mock session however for instance the session path would be /Users/ianobrien/Desktop. Pro Tools hasn't been crashing which is interesting. Sometimes it prompts me if I wanna save, sometimes it doesn't? I think usually if it doesn't I just saved it which seems normal to be but I could be wrong. I did exactly as you did and did File > Close Session closed out of Pro Tools and tried again and did File > Open Session > Session > Foo, and nothing. I have absolutely no idea. I also forgot to mention I'm on a 2023 Macbook Pro, 13.3.0 Ventura and using ProTools Studio 2023.6.0. All the files haven't left my computer also as my storage got upgraded with getting a new computer. Thanks so much Darryl.

[Darryl Ramm]

I'm a bit lost, what do you mean by "nothing" what exactly are you seeing, use screen shots if it will help. You see no .ptx file? Or you see a .ptx file in the Pro Tools session open dialog

Pro Tools should prompt you to save if it believes changes have been made to a session.

Not that it should necessarily cause this problem but in macOS Settings > Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access and enable Pro Tools (you should see Pro Tools and a on/off slider).

This is getting nuts, you should be seeing errors regardless of the problem, but anyhow, what are some of the main UNIX filesystems permission of a session? e.g. here a session TEST in my Documents...

$ pwd
/Users/darryl/Documents
$ ls -ld TEST
drwxr-xr-x  9 darryl  staff  288 Oct  7 15:14 TEST
$ ls -ld TEST/*
drwxr-xr-x   2 darryl  staff     64 Oct  7 15:14 TEST/Audio Files
drwxr-xr-x   2 darryl  staff     64 Oct  7 15:14 TEST/Bounced Files
drwxr-xr-x   2 darryl  staff     64 Oct  7 15:14 TEST/Clip Groups
drwxr-xr-x  18 darryl  staff    576 Oct  7 18:07 TEST/Session File Backups
-rw-rw-rw-@  1 darryl  staff  61513 Oct  7 09:12 TEST/TEST.ptx
drwxr-xr-x   2 darryl  staff     64 Oct  7 15:14 TEST/Video Files
-rw-rw-rw-   1 darryl  staff    108 Oct  7 15:14 TEST/WaveCache.wfm

Pro Tools log files are in ~/Library/Logs/Avid/Pro* They are plain text but fairly cryptic. But they may have an error or some comment in there that leaps out at you when it tries to open a session. You might ba abel to say compare a log from Pro Tools just starting up and quitting to one where you open a session that fails and see if you can spot a difference.

Oh and be sure to trash prefs, just because, should have started with that. Use Pete Gate's free PT Prefs app to trash prefs.

And you need to do a test for corrupt plugins since plugins can get involved in writing to the session file. Move every last plugin out of the plugin folder (/Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins). Put them anywhere for now, like the Unused folder. Trash prefs again and start Pro Tools. It will automatically put back the core plugins but then try your test again starting with creating a totally new session (not from a template) and see if you can save and then open that.

And then if still not working *don't* put the plugins back. Create a new macOS Admin user account and repeat the tests from that account creating a new session and saving to it's Desktop or Documents folder).

[ianntobrienn]

I'm so so sorry for this string of problems. I have no idea what happened so I apologize deeply. I see a ptx file on my desktop it just doesn't show up in the ProTools UI (See attached), as Foo should be there. I didn't give Avid nor ProTools full disk access but I just did and I retested it and nothing changed, the same issues still occur. But that was good thinking! I found what I think is Foo Log Files? It doesn't look like that and is a lot longer? Should I be concerned?? Here's a snippit?

*** Digidesign Session Trace for: /Applications/Pro Tools.app (pid=0xe248, version=23.6.0)
*** Build Details: Build: Production; Branch: release-2023-r2-ptsw-release; InternalVersion: 2023.R2.0; Target: Release(0); Build: 110
*** Starting Timestamp: Saturday, October 7, 2023 at 8:16:44 PM Central Daylight Time (49499.492455 s)
*** System Details: OS Version: 13.3,0, CPU Speed: N/A, Architecture: Apple Silicon, native, Num Processors: 8 logical 8 physical, Memory: 8192 MB
*** Build Date: Jun 6 2023
*** Built with: Clang++ 13.0.0 (clang-1300.0.29.30) for MacOS / ARM
*** Expected Release Date: 2023-06-08
*** DigiTrace Config File: /Applications/Pro Tools.app/Contents/Resources/config.digitrace

[ianntobrienn]

Okay I have an update that'll get the problem potentially solved. I feel kinda dumb for not correlating the two now but ever since I switched macs i've had this error message pop up.

Could not complete your request because Permission denied (13) while deleting "UsageAnalytics.pref" while opening "UsageAnalytics.pref".

I assumed this was some Avid User Data thing so I didn't really pay it much attention but copying it and googling it it turns out that other people are going through the same thing? So that's positive I think? I hope

Also thank you for bearing with me Darryl, you are an angel.

[Darryl Ramm]

You are just looking in "recent" files in the Dashboard? You've not been mentioning that, we've been talking about using Pro Tools File>Open Session and explicitly navigating to where you see the session file in the file system and opening it. What happens when dismiss the Dashboard and use File>Open Session as I've been describing?

That's the start of a log file, the interesting stuff, if any, will be well down in the log file where you try to open a session. You would likely have to do significant poking around to see if something interesting is there. Maybe leave this while you do all the other stuff I mentioned. I'll be offline for a while but you have a lot of stuff to try.