Tuesday, June 24, 2008

PT: Exporting (aka "Bouncing") out of Pro Tools


At some point, you may want to actually listen to a project that you have worked on in Pro Tools in some other format (CD/iTunes) or upload songs to a website. In order to do this, you need to export the song out of PT as a stereo audio file. The process for doing this in PT is called "Bouncing to Disk".

Here is a quick recipe for Bouncing:


  1. Make sure that all the appropriate tracks are set to play back (not Muted).
  2. Check that the area that you will be bouncing is just the length of the song - make sure that there are no stray regions floating around to the right of where the song ends. Pro Tools will automatically find the farthest right point of any region in the session and consider that the end point, so pay attention to where this is! (Hint: if your song is only supposed to be 2 minutes, and PT says it's going to take 15 minutes to bounce, you've probably got some stray region action going on.)
  3. If everything's cool, then go to File>Bounce to>Disk.
  4. The Bounce Options window will then pop up, where you can specify the details of the audio file you're exporting. For now, let's just use the following settings:
      • Bounce Source: Out 1-2 (Stereo)
      • File Type: WAV
      • Format: Stereo Interleaved
      • Resolution: 16
      • Sample Rate: 44100
5. Once you've made your settings, hit the Bounce button at the bottom of the
window.
6. Now a new window will pop, called Save Bounce As. Here you name the file and tell PT where you want to save it.
* Note: If you don't make any changes, PT will automatically save the new file in
the Audio Files folder of the Pro Tools session you are working with.
7. Hit the Save button and PT will start the Bouncing process. A window will pop up that says "Bouncing to Disk" with the Time Remaining counting down. When it is done, the window will automatically close.
8. Find the file on your hard drive.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I have a question. I have to export a few sessions out of Pro Tools HD to be mixed in logic. How can I do it so that when the person mixing the sessions sees it, it is organized and ready to be mixed. ANY help is appreciated