

So, initially, I just double-clicked on the session file on my backup drive to open up my 11-year-old session. All my backups are now ‘online’, and I can access them without having to hunt through drives and disks looking for the right session. So, a while back I invested in a dedicated 8TB drive, and copied everything off all my backup drives and older DVD backups in order to have one consolidated backup disk, a Seagate archive drive in an external chassis connected by eSATA to my Mac Pro. I used to keep a selection of drives on the shelf, but if these aren’t used for a while they don’t always spin up when you plug them back in, as the bearings can go sticky. When a plug-in fails to load because you don’t have a valid licence in your iLok, you’ll get this rather misleading message!But back to my session created with Pro Tools 7.3. Pro Tools 10 was the last version that could open a session with SD2 files and automatically convert them to WAV (BWF) files once this is done, you should be able to open the converted session happily in Pro Tools 12. Note that the older your Pro Tools sessions, the more likely it is that the audio file format used will be Sound Designer II, as that was the default audio file format for Pro Tools in the early years. The same applies to session files from versions of Pro Tools earlier than v5.1. If the audio files are Sound Designer II (SD2) format, you will need to find a system with Pro Tools 10 or earlier installed. Pro Tools 12 can only open sessions where the audio files are in WAV or AIFF formats. The main one is to do with the audio file format.

So, although Pro Tools 12 will open sessions from v5.1 upwards, there are some caveats to bear in mind. Dime Or Dozen?Įvery so often, when Avid release a major new version of Pro Tools, they drop support for the oldest session and audio file formats that the previous version could open. Fast forward 11 years, and what would happen when I opened this old session? In this article I am going to walk you through exactly what did happen, and cover the issues that can crop up when you try to get access to older Pro Tools sessions. At that time, Pro Tools sessions were PTF files, and I would have been using Pro Tools 7.3. Today, I needed to open a Pro Tools session I had recorded and mixed back in 2006. In practice, you may need to know a few tricks! In theory, old Pro Tools sessions should open in version 12.
