How To Fix And Prevent Corrupted Pro Tools Sessions

Nothing is worse than working hard on a mix, then taking to to another studio and being greeted with the Corrupt Session error message. If you follow these two simple tips, your sessions will have a much greater chance of making it from A to B unscathed.

KEEP YOUR SESSION NAMES SHORT- One of the most common causes of trouble for any computer program, is file naming errors. HERE is a link to a page that describes characters particular Operating Systems do not want you to have in any file name. But Protools session files and folders seem to be even more sensitive to names than other files (especially when considering how much time and effort can be put in to a session, any chance for error seems to be magnified exponentially) So you must also take in to account the amount of characters used in the names. My personal experience has found that any name over 18 characters is crossing over into the danger zone. Come up with a naming scheme that you are comfortable with and can reduce the number of characters used for naming. My naming scheme is the first letters of words in the title, and a version number. Example: “Take the Money and Run” mix version 2 would be “TMRv2″. With this scheme, it eliminates both length issues and unwanted characters.

WHEN TRANSFERRING SESSIONS, GO ONE AT A TIME- This is something that I have picked up from working with multiple recording sessions. It may be an unnecessary step (like the “Tweak-Head” export option in PT) but I have found it to be quite effective, especially when transferring multiple sessions at once had failed.

Hopefully these two steps will help keep your sessions working properly.

EXTRA TIP- If you do find yourself with a session that is not opening, but have the time to go back to the station where you last edited (and possibly corrupted) the file and do a “Save Copy In.” This will save all of your session data, audio files, and everything else associated with the session in a new self contained folder. This has worked many times for recovering sessions that I thought were doomed to only be edited on one workstation.

EXTRA TIP 2- If you can not break away from where you are, a way of effectively getting to the information in the corrupted session is creating a new session. Then opening up the import session data dialogue window and import all the data from the corrupted session. NOTE: You will loose your automation and pan information.

Comment if you have any tricks or tips you might want to share regarding this topic also!