Recording into pro tools 9

Now that everything's set up, let's use it in Pro Tools. While iTunes is playing something, open a new Pro Tools session and add a few new tracks. Choose an interface for input on a track - and lookie there! Hey hey, it's Soundflower! Click record, and there's your iTunes audio going straight into Pro Tools.

And best of all, assuming you select your audio interface as outputs for the track, there's no need to mute it because no Pro Tools audio is feeding into Soundflower. Here's an extra step so you won't have to fiddle with this again: Let's set up your Mac to automatically launch Soundflowerbed at startup so this whole thing becomes a set it and forget it affair. Go to system preferences in the Apple Menu. Select "Accounts". Then select "Login Items". In the Soundflower folder, select Soundflowerbed.

You're done. And like I said, you'll never need to fiddle with this stuff again That's where it gets frustrating. Sadly, you'll probably need to import them and change the inputs on your Pro Tools mixer when first opening older sessions. This is why I said to begin by getting a damn drink! I'm glad this helped somebody other than myself. Very COOL! Small world, eh? The drivers for it were so buggy.

I bought an Apogee Duet and was blown away by how good the thing sounded. And I love the form factor of the Duet. It's a giant volume knob on my desk. Love it. I switched back to Pro Tools as soon as PT9 was released. It's great being able to use 3rd party hardware. Pro Tools and the Apogee Duet are a perfect match if all you need is a stereo input and a stereo output.

Rob said: By the way, there are easier ways to record iTunes etc in Pro Tools. With a Duet, it's easier to just buy an adapter to go from the headset output to the Duet's inputs. Brian said: WOW! You wouldn't believe how hard I've been looking for this info. Thank you!! For weeks I've been trying to figure out how to get the audio from Pro Tools into Skype so I can set up a screen sharing situation.

Hard to believe its so complex to accomplish. I need some help please. Your post is awesome, followed all the steps, but when it came to selecting the agregate playback engine, there just wasn't an option to change it?

No drop down. Rob said: It's a Pro Tools 9 only feature. As of Pro Tools 9, you're no longer locked into only Digidesign now Avid hardware. Simon said: Great post Rob. Thanks for sharing this. One question, is there a way to do this with Pro Tools 8? Rob said: Sadly, Simon, there isn't. This is for Pro Tools 9 and later only. Everything changed with Pro Tools 9. Hmmmm, any help, thanks lee. I don't have either PT 10 or mPowered.

The Pro Tools forums can be really helpful. Check them out. Cactus said: Love the clarity. Just can't open soundflowerbed as an app. Not your issue. But shame. Under "Input" select "Soundflower 2ch ". Under "Output" select Fritz said: thanks for this. Gerrit said: Great explanation and thanks for that: I got it running this time which I couldn't get to following other instructions on the net. Email Address: won't be published. URL: Remember? There were also a couple of occasions when everything looked to be working but no sound emerged until I quit and relaunched Pro Tools.

In general, however, it was stable enough to use and never fell over during recording, though it was not as reliable as Cubase is on my system. I had less time to test things on the Mac, but encountered no problems in that period. If you care about this, Cubase, Sonar and most other DAWs let you enter an offset value in samples, and will automatically slip your recordings by this amount when placing them on the timeline.

Pro Tools currently doesn't. For those considering a move from another DAW, it's also worth flagging up a point about how Pro Tools handles input monitoring. Because you're hearing the input signal directly through said utility, you don't need to hear it again through your DAW; but when you hit play in your DAW, you do want to hear the track you've just recorded. In Pro Tools, by contrast, track arming and input monitoring are the same thing. Unless, that is, you mute the track to which you're recording, or lower its fader — in which case you'll have to remember to unmute it on playback, then mute it again for the next take, and so on.

This is a nuisance, especially when you're recording multiple inputs in which case it's worth making them into a Mix Group so you can mute and unmute them all with one click. I've been whingeing about this in Pro Tools reviews ever since the launch of the original Mbox in , and in the context of Pro Tools 9 it's probably now my number one gripe.

I'm not quite sure how this piece of received wisdom became so entrenched. Still, the Internet is a powerful medium, and delay compensation in native versions of Pro Tools was the number one feature request from users. Avid have duly obliged, and Pro Tools 9 now features the delay compensation engine that was previously available only in HD.

To be used as inserts in the mixer, hardware effects have to be attached to the same numbered inputs and outputs, and if you want their delays compensated for, you have to calculate them manually — there's no automated 'pinging' for delays as you find in some other DAWs. This was the case regardless of which audio interface I was using.

At the time of writing, the latest version of the UAD2 software 5. Like delay compensation, most of the other 'new' features in the basic Pro Tools 9 have been available in HD for quite a while. That doesn't make them any less of a big deal, though, and together they amount to a massive shot in the arm for Pro Tools as a native system. All of them have been described in detail in previous SOS articles, so I won't go into detail, but here's an outline of what you can expect:.

Beat Detective is an automated editing tool for knocking wayward drum performances into shape, and although it's quite long in the tooth now, I've yet to find a better alternative.

As it happens, just before the review period I had exactly such a performance that I wanted to conform to a rigid tempo grid. All of the Elastic Audio modes compromised the sound to an unacceptable extent, especially on floor toms. Beat Detective in action. Here, I've just analysed the Snare track and hit 'Add Unique' to combine its triggers with those generated from the Kick track.

This allows you to gather together a composite set of 'triggers' — say, from kick and snare drum tracks — and apply them to all your drum tracks simultaneously, thus preserving phase relationships between them. For some reason, the first time I tried this in PT9 it wouldn't let me collect anything, but after that, it worked as expected. For more advanced video work, though, you'll want to add the Complete Production Toolkit 2, which enables HD features such as multiple up to 64! Assigning a VCA fader to multiple audio tracks in your mix allows you to raise or lower their levels simultaneously with one fader move.

The benefits of working in this way may seem subtle at first, but can be substantial in practice. Here, I have two guitar tracks, each of which has its own volume automation graph.

These tracks are, in turn, assigned to a Mix Group controlled by the VCA track below, which has a further layer of automation. The blue lines show the resulting composite automation graph for each track.

Hand in hand with VCA groups comes a slew of advanced automation features, again available for the first time in a native system thanks to the Complete Production Toolkit 2. These are too many and too complex to describe in full here, but include various useful ways to write multiple layers of automation for a single fader, which can later be 'coalesced' to a single curve, plus support for snapshot automation, where settings for the entire Pro Tools mixer, or any subset of its parameters, can be stored and recalled for individual sections of a Session.

Again, most of these features were introduced or updated in Pro Tools HD 7. Also included as standard are the more powerful version of the Digibase browser, complete with Catalogs, and the Export Session as Text option.

Oh, and remote control of Avid's PRE mic preamps is now universal as well, though I don't suppose there are many of these about in native systems. Pro Tools 9 is an unusual update, in that nearly all of its 'new' features aren't new at all. Admittedly, support for ASIO and Core Audio is a deal that's about as big as they come, but apart from that, almost everything was already there in HD.

In practice, this is not an issue unless you need to use large sample libraries, but it probably needs to happen soon. At a stroke, they have removed almost all the frustrations afflicting the many users who wanted or needed to belong to the Pro Tools world, but lacked the budget to go HD. The same is not likely to be true of HD users, though.

Unless you want to take advantage of the ability to run a native Pro Tools rig when away from the studio, there's almost nothing in Pro Tools 9 HD that wasn't in 8. I do better work in it, and I do it faster. Avid's pricing positions it squarely in the DAW pack: around the same as the full versions of Cubase and Digital Performer and slightly dearer than Logic Pro or Sonar, though if anything, it's perhaps the much cheaper and highly customisable Reaper that can most closely match Pro Tools' functionality.

Each of its rivals can boast features that the basic Pro Tools 9 lacks, but the reverse is also true; this is no longer 'crippleware', but a very powerful tool.

While the Core Audio implementation appears pretty solid, ASIO support in Pro Tools 9 still feels a little immature, both in comparison with other applications such as Cubase, and with Avid's own hardware drivers. If you're planning on using a Windows system, check carefully that your preferred audio hardware works properly: the AIR Users' Blog maintains an unofficial list at www.

But it's already very usable with the right interfaces, and this is such an important and central issue that I'm sure Avid and other manufacturers will be working to improve it. In other respects, Pro Tools 9 is remarkably free of bugs and teething troubles, because so much of its functionality has already been tried and tested in the HD world. Having used Pro Tools 9, I'm no longer sceptical about Avid's new corporate openness. In fact, it's exciting to speculate about where it might lead next.

VST and Audio Units support? The release of an open RTAS software development kit? Macro support? Full session compatibility with other DAWs? If enough of us say we want it, there's a good chance Avid will implement it. Until then, I'm off for a skate on the River Styx However, there are one or two neat additions that weren't in Pro Tools 8, and a couple of them are really useful.

Top of my list is the 'New Track' routing option that appears when you click on a track send or output slot right. Now you can do it all in one go. Select New Track, and Pro Tools will not only ask you what sort of track you want to create, but automatically assign an unused bus to it, and rename that bus into the bargain. And, of course, the usual Pro Tools shortcuts apply, so holding down Alt will route all tracks or sends to the new track, and Shift-Alt will route all outputs or sends on selected tracks.

Easy peasy. It would be better still if you got the option to automatically solo-safe the new track — perhaps that can be added in a later update. On the subject of shortcuts, in previous versions of Pro Tools, when you wanted to create a new Playlist on a track, you had to click on a tiny arrow icon in its Edit window track header.

Since this is something you need to do often when overdubbing, it was a pain in the neck, and mercifully Avid have now added a keyboard shortcut for 'Create New Playlist on Selected Track'. Harder to evaluate, but probably more important in the scheme of things, is support for the EuCon protocol.