Audio Bounces are longer than my song?

[sal-esguy]

For some reason, Protools is adding about 40secs of silence to my song when I bounce to disk. I have been pulling out my hair try to find the offending audio file. Has anyone else experienced this? This only occurs on one particular session. Other bounces of other sessions have been fine.

thanks in advance for your help

[Roy Howell]

Are you highlighting the session to the length you want before hitting 'Bounce to Disc'?

[Mr_Seven]

Look for midi regions that go over.

[homerg]

You need to mark the beginning and ending points of the song with the blue arrows on the timeline. Just click at the begining point then drag the blue arrow to the end of the song. Bounce.

[fwafitz]

Sorry, i'm just now seeing your post.

I've had the same problem. Some of my bounces end as it should when the song ends and i never highlighted or marked anything... and others just keep on going and going long after the song is done.

This is what I've discovered with some testing.

It has something to do with when you first drag the files into the session or record into the session. When you do this, the session becomes the length of your longest audio track and ProTools seems to "remember" that length (look at the minutes ruler and scroll to the end of the song). If the audio gets shorter through editing,
the length of the session still stays the original length and that becomes the length of the bounce (unless you highlight the bounce length).

Say your audio was originally 5 minutes and you edited it down to one minute. If you scroll to the end of the session you'll see that the session is still 5 minutes long even though there is no audio under the last four minutes. I never figured out how to shorten the session length, but you can drag the new shorter files into a new session and the new session will be one minute long. Of course that can be a pain if you need to bring plugins, settings, fader and pan positions, and all the other stuff with it.

If you drag a file into a session and never edit it any shorter, or if the file becomes longer through editing, the bounce will automatically stop at the end of the audio without any highlighting or marking.

That's what I've found, anyway. Hope that helps.

[Roy Howell]

The thing is though, even if your session is 5 minutes long, you should be able to bounce only the length you want. I even do tiny 10-30 second sample bounces within a session all the time.
If you guys are putting the cursor in the timeline bar, highlighting the section you want, and it is STILL bouncing the whole length, then I don't have the answer. But, if not, try it that way.

Also, if you want to simply 'shave' that excess 4 minutes off your session even before you bounce, get in 'Shuffle Mode', highlight the whole area you DON't want, and hit 'Delete'.

~Roy

[Streabogg]

Hello, 20 years after this question came up, I had the same issue. The bounce created a song longer than the track I was bouncing. My track was in a multi track session and I only wanted to bounce the single track to an audio file. I was positive I had selected ONLY the track I wanted to bounce and nothing else. It was solo'd and all others were muted. One thing I noticed, that the length of the bounced file was as long as the longest track in my session (6:12), whereas, the track I wanted to bounce was only 5:21. then, after trying it with other tracks, I noticed that they all bounced to a file that was the same length of time (6:12) and had the EXACT SAME number of bytes each time, despite the tracks being different lengths with different data.

The SOLUTION for me was easy [not easy to find! but easy to fix once found]: I had "Automation Follows Edit" enabled (by accident) [ the button was lit BLUE] . Once I disabled it [lit orange] all my tracks bounced correctly to their correct length and only their specific data.