Trashing Those Preferences

Tool Thursday with Jed Hackett...

Is your Pro Tools rig prone to crashes? One source of trouble for your rig are preferences. Certain changes you make to your Pro Tools session are stored in temporary files called preferences. For instance, when you change your hardware, playback engine, or preference settings, those changes are stored in preference files. When Pro Tools crashes, those preferences are easily corrupted. If you don’t get rid of them after a crash you are much more likely to experience more crashes until you do.

Note: PC users consult with digidesign about this before you do it. This is meant for mac users.

After a crash you should throw away the following files found in Home>Library>Preferences:
1)DAE Prefs
2)Digisetup.OSX
3)Pro Tools v7.x Preferences
4)com.digidesign.ProToolsHD.plist

Next, on each hard drive connected to your system there is a folder called digidesign databases. Trash that as well. Don’t worry, Pro Tools will rebuild all the files that you just trashed the next time you fire up the program.

Once you have thrown those files away, reboot your computer. When the mac reboots, it will repair any damage to the boot up drive before launching OSX.

After your mac reboots, open the disk utility program located in Applications>Utilities. You will notice that for each drive on your system the disk utility lists the technical name for the drive and underneath is the name you gave the drive when you formated it. For example 233.8 GB Maxtor 7Y250MO>Mac Drive. Click on the tech name for the drive so that it is highlighted and click Repair Disk Permissions. This will take just a minute or two. The disk permissions are also easily corrupted and repairing them will help alleviate problems.

Next, launch the Pro Tools software, then open the session you were working on. Pro Tools will be just a bit more sluggish opening up for the first time after you follow these steps; it has to rebuild the files that you just trashed. Pro Tools will set your preferences back to the factory presets.

The last step is to set your session settings back to the way you like to work. For those of you that don’t live and breath Pro Tools tech geek stuff, here are some basic settings to restore:

1) Under Options> turn on Quick Punch and Mute Frees Assigned Voice. Also, make sure your Delay Compensation is set as you want it. On if you’re mixing, Off if you’re recording.

2)Go to Setup> I/O and make sure your I/O settings are back to normal. How you set them will depend on the type and number of I/O’s you have.

3) Under Setup>Preferences>Display turn off Tools and Tips. I don’t know about you, but the constant pop up bubbles drive me nuts!

4) Under Setup>Preferences>Operation choose Record Online at Insertion Selection. For Open Ended Record Allocation Select Limit to XX Minutes. Set the number of minutes to the maximum amount of time that you would ever need to record a song, for most people that would be 10 minutes. Lastly, make sure that AutoSave is turned on.

5) Under Setup>Preferences>Editing change Conversion Quality to Tweakhead (Slowest).

6) If you have Pitch N Time or another TC/E plug-in, under Setup>Preferences>Processing change the TC/E Plug-in back to the one you wish to use. If you don’t have an alternate TC/E program just leave this setting alone.

Now that you have set things back to normal you are all set to go. This may seem like a lot to go through but it is well worth it. You will have fewer crashes and less stress.

Take care,

Jed