Have you ever got this error message “End Of Stream Encountered” or “Could not complete Open Session command because of end of stream encountered” We heard about this ‘golden oldie’ making a comeback recently. In this quick tip article we cover 2 reasons why this error message could be popping up when you are trying to open a session in Pro Tools, First, Pro Tools Standard or Pro Tools Ultimate.

Illegal Characters Being Used in The Session Name

If you get another variant of the end of stream error message “Could not complete your request...End of stream" then this can because of what Avid describe as illegal characters being used in the session, project or file name.

Illegal characters are * | " : < > ? / \ These should not be used in session or project names or media names, Apparently they may be used when naming playlists but be aware that they will be replaced by an underscore (_) if they make their way to an audio file name via recording, bouncing, consolidating, etc. As a consequence it is recommended that you try and avoid using these characters when naming sessions and playlists in Pro Tools.

Also avoid using these illegal characters in external hard drives and networked volume names, naming drives and folders as well as using forward / and back \ slashes and connecting external drives sharing the same exact name.

Basically the safest thing to do is not to use * | " : < > ? / \ when naming anything!

Session or Project File Has Become Corrupted

The other scenario, where an end of stream error message can pop up, is when you have a corrupted session file. In this case, the best solution for dealing with a corrupt session file is to create a new session and use Import Session Data to import the tracks from the corrupt session into a new clean session. More often than not this will fix the problem.

However, if when you have imported all the tracks, you end up back where you started, then it is possible the corruption is connected to a particular file used in the session, in which case the first thing to do is to check for illegal characters in session, project, hard drive and audio file names. If that draws a blank then try creating another new blank session and this time import the tracks from the corrupt session, one at a time, or in small groups and and each import stage, check the session will open to narrow it down to one or two tracks and then within those tracks narrow it down to maybe one particular audio file that has been corrupted.

Effectively this error message is about corrupted data, whether that is genuine corruption, or corruption to a file name by using an illegal character. Either way, Pro Tools is unable to read the data and throws up this error message as it tries to open the session or project.