New Year, new start! While you have some time on your hands and a line drawn in the sand then it might be a good time to do some housekeeping and get your Pro Tools computer in shape for the coming year. Here are 4 ways to get your Pro Tools computer in shape.

Sort Your Files

It does not take long to have hard drives filled with samples, loops, libraries and sessions, if you don’t label them in a meaningful way then you’ll soon find you are wasting precious creative time looking for these things. In the absence of a meaningful workspace in Pro Tools the need to label is even greater. The right labelling system is the one that works for you, make it as simple or as complicated as you wish, although the simpler the better in my book. Both Windows and Mac OS have good search built in, but why make life hard - a few hours spent labelling the files you use for your music production is time well spent.

Archive Your Projects

If the home of some people was like their computer then they would be waste deep in crap. Once you have your stuff labelled in a meaningful way then consider archiving the stuff you don’t use that often. Having your local hard drives full of sessions dating back years is pointless, with the cost of hard drives dropping all the time then it’s a good idea to get stuff archived and free up your local hard drives for the new work you are doing. Also don’t forget that with the speed of internet connection improving and cloud based storage such as Gobbler built into Pro Tools then you can also archive and back-up in this way too.

Thin Your Plug-ins

Plug-ins have never been cheaper, it doesn’t take long for your plug-in folder to fill up with hundreds of plug-ins. Our team review a lot of plug-ins and soon there’s several hundred plug-ins sitting in the folder, just watch Pro Tools scanning and loading them each time it starts up. You may want to consider moving the plug-ins you seldom use into the Unused plug-ins folder, doing this will speed up your Pro Tools load times and also save you having to search through long lists of plug-ins every time you need to use one. If you want to ignore this advice then watch our Pro Tools tutorial on creating your own plug-in shortcuts video.

Update Your Software

Updates are a two edged sword, sometimes they fix your problems, other times they create even more problems for some users. Updates are an essential part of taking care of your Pro Tools computer system but it is worth doing your research first, we try and report any update issues as soon as we know about them, for example the recent issues surrounding the Pro Tools 11.0.3 update have been documented in several posts. However an out of date plug-in can crash your Pro Tools sessions, you can use cool software such as PluginUpdate from our friends at Kazrog. Ignoring updates to either to Pro Tools system is not possible, it’s just a case of doing your research when you are presented with new updates. 

A good place to start if you are unsure about getting your system in shape is by checking out our Support Tools section sponsored by Pro Tools PC and also our Pro Tools FAQ section.