From the course: Pro Tools 2021 Essential Training: 101 - The Basics

Verifying available space for recording - Pro Tools Tutorial

From the course: Pro Tools 2021 Essential Training: 101 - The Basics

Start my 1-month free trial

Verifying available space for recording

- Before starting a recording project, you want to make sure that you have adequate disk space available in your record destination to complete the project. Running out of space mid recording will not only interrupt the recording session, but could destabilize your system, especially if you're recording on your system drive. Here I'll provide some tips for estimating file sizes and for checking the storage space available on your system. Pro Tools records audio using sample rates ranging from 44.1 kHz to 192 kHz with bit depths ranging from 16-bits to 32-bit floating point. The higher the sample rate and bit depth, the larger the resulting files, and the more disk space you will be using. A starting point for estimating file sizes is to recognize that at 44.1 kHz and 16-bits, Pro Tools will require approximately 5 MB per minute for mono audio. Recording in stereo will require twice as much disk, or 10 MB per minute, since stereo recording requires two discreet channels of audio information. One channel for audio going to the left speaker, and the other channel for audio going to the right speaker. Increasing the sample rate or bit depth will result in corresponding increases in file sizes. For example, doubling the sample rate to 88.2 kHz for a 16-bit file will double the storage requirements to 10 MB per minute for mono audio, and 20 MB per minute for stereo. Similarly, doubling the bit depth from 16-bits to 32-bit floating point, will also double the storage requirements. At 44.1 kHz, mono files will require 10 MB per minute of storage space, while stereo files require 20 MB per minute. At 88.2 kHz, those storage requirements go up again to 20 MB per minute for mono and 40 MB per minute for stereo. As you can see storage requirements can increase dramatically when using higher sample rates and bit depths. For that reason you should choose the lowest sample rate and bit depth for your session that will meet your needs and intended purposes. If you have an idea for how many tracks you need in a session, and how long the recording will be, you can estimate the overall amount of storage needed by doing some simple math. And Pro Tools can help you out with this process. Once you've created the session, specifying the required sample rate and bit depth, you can check the amount of space available in the disk usage window. Choose window, disk usage to open the window. This window shows all of the drives connected to my system, the size of each of those drives, how much space is available on each drive, and the percentage of the drive that's currently available. But more importantly the final column shows me, at my current sample rate and bit depth, how many track minutes are available on the drive. So for example if I planned to create a session with ten tracks in it, for a ten minute long recording session, that would total two, a hundred track minutes of mono audio. But keep in mind that you'll need to account for stereo tracks that you plan to use which will consume twice as much disk space. And you'll also need to allow some extra space for multiple takes. Each full take on each track will consume another ten track minutes in mono, or twenty track minutes in stereo. So the information in this window verifies that I can create the project I'm looking for within the 52,544 track minutes available on my audio SSD drive. Verifying the available space on your connected drives prior to starting a project will help you record with confidence and avoid potential issues as you work. By checking the disk usage window periodically, you can keep an eye on your storage space and manage your media files to keep your system running smoothly.

Contents