Pro tools making audio file duplicates

[kieranguitar]

My band did some recording at a studio, which started on PT 7.4 but upgraded to PT 8 pretty early in the process.

We transferred everything onto our external hard drive so we could do the editing at home (I recently got PT8).

When I originally loaded the session from the External hard drive, this message came up:

>
“This session is saved on a volume set to
“Transfer” only.
If permitted, set the volume(s) in question to
“P” (Playback) or “R” (record) in the
Workspace.

Otherwise, choose OK to save a copy of this
session and its media to a valid playback
volume. The session copy will automatically
open from the chosen location.”
<

I chose OK and saved it on the system drive of our mac.

Each time I’ve loaded the session off the system drive the size of the project has increased a lot (mainly the size of the Audio Files folder).

It appears to me that the audio files are duplicated each time the session is launched.

The session has only been launched about 4 times.
Original total size of the session/project was about 50GB in total.
The total size of project is now around 230GB and my system drive has nearly run out of space!

Anyone know what’s causing the problem and what I can do to stop it making duplicates?

Cheers for any suggestions.


Oh, I have just bought a dedicated external hard drive to work from (but it hasn’t arrived yet)

[albee1952]

Well, for starters, you need to get your sessions off the system drive, for proper operation(never mind that you are running out of space. When the new drive arrives and gets set as a Recording volume, I would open each session(from its original location) clean up the regions bin by removing unused regions and then choose Save Session Copy, and save onto the new external drive(make sure you check the box for :copy all audio files"). Once that finishes, open the new copy from the external drive and verify it plays okay. Once it does, then you have the option of deleting the original(but I might hang on to it for a while and just drag it to the external, assuming you got plenty of space). I think you are correct about things getting copied(and I don't know why). Of course, every time you use AudioSuite to process a region, it creates a new region(so if you use AS for an EQ, then again for a compressor, now you have 3 versions of a region). There are lots of ways audio gets created and added to the list(that's the "bad" side of non-destructive recording/editing). Once your skills allow, its okay to dump a lot of the extra regions(but be careful at first so you don't shoot yourself in the foot-something I have done myself)

[kieranguitar]

Thanks for that, I appreciate your help.

The problem's solved! here's what happened:

The new hard drive arrived yesterday (OWC Mecury Elite-AL Pro 1TB) and I copied the original session onto it (the 50gb one), and removed the one off my system drive (the 230gb one).
I also submitted a case to the support centre and they got back with a couple of suggestions, firstly to use the "compact" command (pg 507 Ref Guide), basically just another way of clearing up unused regions and audio files from what I can gather (I haven't done this yet though cos I want to keep those files so I can finish editing). Secondly, they recommended downloading the Tech Support Utility for both PT 7 and 8 and using it to delete ProTools preferences and databases (apparently common causes of errors). Click here for the link to the page to download:
Tech Support Folder - Utilities and Troubleshooting Tools

I'm not sure whether it was putting everything on the external hard drive or using the tech support utility that solved it or both, but it's working fine now. Not only has the duplicate problem been fixed, but the session only takes 2 seconds to load, rather than the 2 hours it was taking previously!!

Cheers
Kieran