Playlists are incredibly useful. If you’re new to Pro Tools you might easily get by without them but they bring simplicity and speed to managing takes and if you get comfortable with them they can do more to improve the quality of your music than any premium plugin or mixing technique. Find out more here.

Playlists

A playlist is blank space on the timeline. Each track you create has one but the first thing to understand is that you can have more than one. An Audio or MIDI track can have many alternative takes available as playlists and it’s very quick and convenient to create a new playlist when tracking and sort through them later finding the best material for your finished project.

It’s called a playlist because in any DAW you arrange clips on the timeline and this list of instructions gets played in the order you have specified in your list. If you want to know more about clips and how they relate to files on your hard drive read this article .

Why Would I Want To Use A Playlist?

A great example of when Playlists are useful is when tracking vocals. There are so many variables and it’s very likely that your vocalist will want to have a few tries. While you could keep duplicating the vocal track and record on each new track to keep alternatives, this would be a waste of tracks, would add clutter to your session and would be inconvenient to use. Creating new playlists solves all these issues.

In this example, by creating a new playlist for each take it is quick and convenient to swap between alternative takes, change to playlists view and you can see them all in context with each other and you can easily solo alternatives in context and ‘comp’ sections from alternative takes together to make a hybrid take which has the best sections for all the takes together in one place.

Free Video Tutorial

To find out more start here with this free video tutorial brought to you with the support of Avid we look at the basics of Playlists in Pro Tools.

Getting further into Playlists, in this premium tutorial Julian looks deeper into playlists.

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