PT5 Eats, Careful guys!

[johnwhynot]

See the thread "PT5 ate my sound files".

I've had the same thing happen this evening; somewhere during an innocuous cleanup of a copy of a copy of a session file, a bunch of audio files went in the dumpster.

I never delete sound files from within ProTools. I always "remove" them from the session and save a copy (with sound files) to another disk. Then check that everything's OK with the copy before proceeding.

And I make DLT backups of everything in its raw, bloated state just in case something stupid happens.

This evening I needed that backup, despite not deleting anything or trashing anything in the finder.

I think the following operations are suspect and could lead to lost audio files:

Dealing with, duplicating, and especially deleting unused playlists.

Selecting unused regions in the region list and "Removing" them from the session.

Saving a copy of the session with "Copy Audio Files" selected.


Sorry to be vague about the cause, but I don't think anyone, least of all me, knows what the reason is for these things happening.

Rail Rogut had this happen to newly-created soundfiles. I've just had it happen, but fortunately for me the new stuff was left alone and I lost only things that had been backed up already.

Between us we probably have well over a decade of ProTools experience, and I've been engineering sessions since 1986. So no lectures, please, on how not to be an idiot with our data.

Quirks happen. Bugs happen. This is a tough problem to duplicate, but I just did it somehow. Ironically, after reading the thread and posting with a bit of sarcasm about one Digi response (someone who seemed not to have read the thread).

But now you know it wasn't just Rail's computer whacking out on him. Mine did it too, and because I am aware of Rail's report, I'm particularly attentive to this process of winnowing out our sessions.

Digi tech guys, you know now it's a problem.

Other users, be very careful when cleaning up sessions unless you're certain there is another copy of the audio somewhere else.

Even if you don't **** up, YOU MIGHT LOSE AUDIO FILES

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