Importing Audio Into A Session

Basic Import Procedure

Just using a program like Toast Audio Extractor to put some sounds into the Audio Files Folder of your Session Folder will not place those sounds in your Edit Window or make those files appear in the Audio Regions List of your session. That's because your Session Document doesn't "know" about those files and what to do with them until you "tell" it. Writing those instructions into your Session Document is called "Importing Audio."

Here's how you Import Audio: First, go to the Audio Regions list in the upper right of the Edit Window and click on the bar that says "Audio."

A pop-up menu appears.--->

Select "Import Audio."

(By the way, the shortcut for this is SHIFT-SPLAT-I.)

Then as shown below, the "Import Audio" window appears -- and hogs most of the screen, doesn't it? The top of this window resembles the usual Mac file navigation window. First you navigate to the audio drive you want. (Remember: You can always use that handy pulldown button at the upper left to get the broad overview at the desktop level before you start trying to zero in on a particular partition or folder. You can also use the button with the "finger point" icon, or just press SPLAT-D to go to the Desktop.)

In this example, you go to Audio 1 and look for your Session Folder. When you open that folder, you'll see the sub-folder of your Audio Files.

Open your session Audio Files folder and you'll see a list of sounds. They have little "waveform document" icons to indicate that they are Sound Designer II files, which is the type that Pro Tools prefers.

Clicking on one of these soundfiles will highlight it, or place it in the "current file." This means you can audition the sound by clicking on the "Play" and "Stop" buttons.

Find the one of the "Biplane" effects and give it a listen. [You can skip around in the soundfile to some extent by dragging the slider just below the play button. It's a bit awkward, but better than nothing.]

You can put this sound in the "chosen" list by clicking the Add button. You can add more items to the "chosen" list in this manner if you'd like. When you chosen all the soundfiles you want, press "Done."

The "Import" window closes and we're back in our session, only now our chosen soundfiles are listed and highlighted in the Audio Regions list.

The next step would be to click on a biplane soundfile...

...then drag it into a track as seen below:

NOTE: When you import more than one audiofile, they are all highlighted, so that if you try to drag one of them they will all drag into the edit window, one beneath the other on the available tracks. But often this isn't what you had in mind. You can deselect regions highlighted in the Audio Regions list by merely clicking somewhere outside of the Audio Regions list sub-window. Then you can deal with the files individually.

There are other functions available from the Audio Regions List menu; most of them are pretty obscure. One you might well use, though, is the "Clear Selected" choice. Sometimes the regions list gets cluttered up with unused items. You can highlight the ones you want to remove from your session and then choose "Clear Selected." A second dialog window will give you a choice of simply removing the regions from the session or of actually deleting the files from the hard drive. Obviously you need to be cautious about deleting files you or someone else may need.

Remember, "clearing" or removing regions or files from your session doesn't affect the files themselves, it simply removes the session instructions that would otherwise include those regions in the session. But "Deleting" is a drastic, destructive step that eliminates the actual soundfile.

That's pretty much it for the basic Importing of Audio. You can continue reading some advanced tricks for Importing, or you can:

Go back to "Recording Audio Into a Session."

Go to Mixing In Pro Tools - Part 1: Level Adjustment

Or: Go to Table of Contents

Converting and Importing Audio  

You may have noticed that besides the "Add" and "Add All" buttons you have the choice of "Copying" audiofiles. Select this option if you need to import Sound Designer interleaved stereo files, or other formats such as WAV or AIFF. Pro Tools will perform a conversion and create new Sound Designer II versions of the original files inside your Session Audio Files folder. You can also convert SDII files of different sample rates with this method.

How do you know when to convert? When you select a file, the Import Window provides helpful info about the file type, bit depth, and sample rate. And it further prompts you as to whether that file can be directly added to the session, or whether it may play off-speed due to a sample rate conflict. If you to choose "Copy" instead of "Add" and an appropriate converted copy of the file will be created. You'll be prompted as to where that new file should end up.

The "Copy" option has one other useful purpose; there are times when you may be auditioning files from a drive that you won't always have access to. In that case, you may want to have copies of those files in your session folder. (Importing in the usual way simply directs Pro Tools to access the audiofiles from the location where they originally resided.)

Which brings us to the whole issue of --

Importing Audio From Outside Your Session Folder

Although it is highly recommended that all your sound files be located inside your session's Audio Files folder, you can import and use audio that is located elsewhere. This has advantages when you are involved with more complex productions and you are not "time-sharing" workstations.

For instance, there may be existing audiofiles already loaded onto a hard drive for some previous session that you may now want to use on some entirely new project. Or there may be sounds filed away in a folder that many different editors can access -- a kind of "community property" of sounds. As long as the files exist on an audio drive that Pro Tools can access, they can be "imported" or brought into the session.

Please note that we don't have to create new copies of these audiofiles in order to put them in our session. By importing, we're merely writing instructions about where those files exist on a particular drive, and our session document simply "remembers" where those files came from.

Importing is much more efficient than making new copies of audiofiles and placing them into session folders. For starters, it's faster. Also, audiofiles tend to fill up lots of megabytes, so we don't have to create redundant copies of audiofiles all over the place, just so we can use the same "traffic background" in several different sessions.

BUT PLEASE NOTE: You can have major problems if those audiofiles are later moved around to different folders or drives -- when you try to open your old session, Pro Tools won't know where to find those files and will prompt you with a series of dialogs asking "Where is audio such-and-such?" So it pays to keep these files organized and not to move them around haphazardly. And this is obviously easier if you are the only one using the workstation; hence, it's a risky strategy in a film school setting. That's why it's safer to actually create copies of the soundfiles you need and place them in your Audio Files Folder, so that everything you need to recreate the session can be backed up from your Session Folder.

"Find, Drag, and Drop" Importing

The problem with the Pro Tools Import window is that you pretty much need to know where a file is located in order to audition and import it. This becomes difficult on a big movie where you might have several big drives chained together, with lots of little folders to dig through. (It helps if sound effects folders are categorized: Machinery, Vehicles, Doors, etc.) But it can still get tiresome using the Import Window to fish through the files.

There are some third party programs that make searching and auditioning and importing much easier, but there's a compromise approach that utilizes a feature of the Mac OS and Pro Tools. First you go to the Mac Finder level; this is probably best done by going to the Mac Application Menu at the upper right of the Mac screen and selecting "Hide Pro Tools." (You'll know when you're in the Finder because the Application menu will show the Mac OS Finder icon. Now you can search the mounted drives for the files in question using some of the File|Find features of the Mac OS. (The shortcut to activate this is Splat-F.)

A dialog window (called "Sherlock") appears, prompting you to enter the file name, or partial file name of the item you want, such as "biplane." The Mac OS should locate the files; then you have an interesting choice available. Your Pro Tools session is still open, although it is not actively filling the screen. If you now click and select the files you need,you can drag and drop them onto the Pro Tools Icon, or an alias of the icon, and that will import them into your session. When you go back to the Application Menu and select Pro Tools, your Pro Tools window reappears and the files you wanted should be in the Audio Regions list.

Here's what it might look like just before you drop some files onto the Pro Tools alias.

Be aware, though, that importing in this way will not convert any files; you're simply adding them to the session.

Selecting "Import Audio To Track" From the File Menu

You can also access the Import Window from the File Menu, where it has the subtly different name "Import Audio To Track." This hints at a crucial difference. In this case, a new Audio Track will be created for each soundfile you import, the track will be automatically named after the name of the soundfile, and the soundfiles will appear in their respective tracks. This might be just the thing you want, or you could end up creating more tracks than you bargained for, so be aware of this difference. (And if you've already maxed out your track allotment, this option will be grayed out.) But this choice is especially handy for music, where you might like to have tracks dedicated tracks labelled GUITAR, BASS, etc.

Import Tracks From Other Sessions

This particular feature goes well beyond simply importing audiofiles; it enables you to bring fully edited tracks, complete with level setting and other automation from one session into another. It's listed under the File Menu as "Import Tracks." For details, see What's New in 5.1.

Go back to "Recording Audio Into a Session."  

Go on to Mixing In Pro Tools - Part 1: Level Adjustment

Or: Go to Table of Contents

Copyright ©2000 by Rodger Pardee