Cut and paste sections of tracks on edit page

[markus44uk]

I have noticed that if I highlight and cut a section out of one part of a guitar track and then paste it elsewhere in the track, I am actually copying the entire track over again. This is taking up large amounts of disk space and I was wondering if I am doing this wrong.

Basically, I am trying to cut or sometimes copy a guitar part section of a track into another location in the track (to compensate for a poor performance or a bad note). I would have thought that highlighting a section of a track and then copying just that section would only create an additional audio file on the HD that was the size of the cut piece rather than the entire track.

HELP!

[DigiTechSupt]

All editing performed in the Edit Window is non-destructive. Therefore, when you cut/copy/paste regions to different locations, Pro Tools is only using those regions as "pointers" to the source audio file.

As you can see in the Properties section, a Pro Tools session file is very small in comparison to an audio file (a few hundred kbytes compared to a few MB).

Brent

[markus44uk]

Thanks Brent. I guess my question then is why is it necessary for PT to make a complete copy of the audio file each time there is an edit? If it is just pointers, why can't the pointers point to the same audio file? Or alternatively, shouldn't there be an option for destructive editing? Or better yet, maybe a function that "cleans-up" all unused portions of an audio file and just keeps the bits that are highlighted by the pointers. That would save HUGE on disk space no?

[Roy Howell]

Markus,
There's a 'Destructive' record option, I think under 'Operations', which will erase all previous takes for you.

~Roy

[QuikDraw]

Originally posted by markus44uk:
I guess my question then is why is it necessary for PT to make a complete copy of the audio file each time there is an edit?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">It doesn't. The only times that PT actually writes audio files to the disk is when you actually record audio, when you bounce to disk, and when you process with Audiosuite plug-ins. Simple editing does not create audio files. Oh, I forgot Fades. Fades are actually audio files (usually very small ones) that are written to disk in the Fades folder for that session.

Mike

[Stone Knife]

Right- the thing that looks like a new file- a new region- is a definition of the parameters of the file: (starts here, ends here) that shows up in the regions list, as does new audio files, which is why it's easy to think they are new wave files but they aren't.

That was the aspect of Cool Edit Pro that would drive me nuts. Everything you did created a duplicate file.

[mfym]

markus44uk wrote:

Or better yet, maybe a function that "cleans-up" all unused portions of an audio file and just keeps the bits that are highlighted by the pointers. That would save HUGE on disk space no?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">There is a function that does this. It's called 'compact'. When you have finished working on your session, compacting will delete any unused audio. The manual explains it better.

Hope this helps. [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[markus44uk]

Thanks all of you. As usual, the DUC comes through with the straight poop. I guess it was all those damn regions in the regions list that was throwing me off.