Pete Gates who is the man behind the incredibly useful Pro Tools Prefs Helper has released a new web site to host PT Prefs helper and also on his new site he has added two more applications - PG PT Session and PG PT WAV Checker.

PG PT Prefs Helper

Pete has released v1.6.15 of this brilliant free utility. The Release Notes for PT Prefs Helper say that in this version he has removed the Eucon preference trashing for now. He had followed the Avid guidelines for deleting Eucon prefs but have had two reports of it breaking the S6 Eucon control app.

PT Prefs is a utility program for Mac OSX which can delete / backup / restore various preference and support files - Pro Tools preference trashing in other words! It doesn't delete any essential system files, they are all just settings which at worst can be manually re-entered. Sometimes Pro Tools benefits from having these files cleared out (after a crash/blackout etc) - Pro Tools remakes them with default settings when it is run next. Therefore if you are unsure which options to check it is safe to check them all, in fact if you are running this software due to a problem rather than as a matter of course I would recommend trashing all preferences, it's more likely to solve the problem.

PG PT Session

PT Session is the first of two new applications from Pete, and unlike PT Prefs Helper which is Mac OSX only PT Session is available for both Mac and Windows.

PG PT Session is a utility initially designed to simplify making music lists. It can open a Pro Tools session text export file and you can then select which tracks to re-export. It then does this in a simplified format - no channel number (with a multi-channel track it just takes the left channel), no event number, removes fade in/fade out/cross fade can optionally ignore muted clips. It can also, on export, optionally merge all the tracks that have been selected into one merge track - useful if you need to just have a list of clips that occur across multiple tracks.

PG PT WAV Checker

PT WAV Checker is the latest addition to the Pete Gates stable of useful Pro Tools related utility apps and is also available for both Mac and Windows.

WAV Checker is a utility that scans WAV files and verifies their structure.  Pete tells us that it hasn’t been battle hardened by other people yet so don’t panic if it flags a file that plays fine (or crashes this software!). If you have a ‘false positive' Pete asks if you would send him a copy of the file (if you are permitted to do so) and he will investigate. If it crashes, also please let him know what you were doing and he will dig into it.

We love what Pete is going for the Pro Tools community. Like a number of developers his day job is as a dubbing mixer and supervising sound editor and has chosen to create some apps in his spare time to solve problems that we all have.