Using the exercise files

If you're a premium member of lynda.com, you'll have access to the exercise files used throughout this title. Once you've downloaded the files, Copy them onto the hard drive that you'll be using. Just make sure not to use the same hard drive on which your operating system is installed. You should use an external hard drive, or a dedicated internal hard drive to avoid any problems. Each chapter in this course has a folder for its exercise files. Inside each chapter, you'll see folders and sessions for each video that has exercise files associated with it. The. ptx file is the Pro Tools session file, located inside each of the applicable exercise folders.

I'm going to open this archive exercise file. You will probably run into a few dialogue boxes or warnings like this when you open up these session files. If you see a warning like this that tells you that this playback engine is not available with the current hardware, Pro Tools is just letting you know that the playback engine saved with the session is not available. This is because I'm using a different audio interface with a different playback engine than what you're using. Clicking Okay will open the session in the playback engine that is available on your system. We'll talk about the playback engine in this course. If you see a message that says your I/O setup has changed since the last time the session was saved, that simply means that you're using a different interface than the one that I am using to create this session.

We'll also talk about the I/O setup in this course. You can safely click "No" unless you want to see the detailed report. Last, if you see a warning that there are missing files, that simply means that the drive where these files were created is not connected to your computer. When the session opens, you can simply choose to automatically find and re-link the audio files, and Pro Tools will find them wherever you've copied them. You can also manually find and relink the files and in the relink window that opens just navigate to and select the exercise files folder wherever you've placed it on your hard drive.

I'm going to click automatically find and relink and in most cases Pro Tools will find and relink the files really quickly. If you don't have access to these exercise files you can still grasp the concepts and techniques that we'll cover just by watching the videos. Also, please feel free to create your own sessions as we go. Just follow along and repeat what I do in the videos to create your own exercise files.