Open Sessions With Inactive Plug-Ins

Introduction

This is another brief tutorial which will show you a little trick to open your sessions without any active Plug-ins.

When would I need this? I hear you say… Well the occasion may arise where you want to quickly check something within a session or make a change which doesn’t require any effects. Opening with inactive plugins means that your sessions will load faster and will use less system resources.

The other reason you may want to use this feature is when your are having those nightmare session troubles! Sometimes certain Plug-ins do not want to get along and it can take some time to establish exactly what the problem is if Pro Tools is not giving you any direction. It was only a few months ago (at the time of writing) that I was working on a large HD session when suddenly certain plug-ins stopped functioning correctly, after opening the session without them and then enabling them one-by-one I was able to discover that two were not playing nice together!

Either way this is a simple technique which can be reverted from with ease!


Opening Sessions

Opening your session with all effects inactive could not be easier, simply locate your session file, hold the Shift key and then open the file, the loading screen will load as normal but without your effects enabled. Simples.

You can of course go through your session and enable the plug-ins individually by either Command_Clicking (mac) CTRL_Click (windows) them or by right-clicking them and selecting ‘Enable‘.


Reverting Back

Your fully functioning session can of course be returned to; navigate to File > Revert To Saved, and you will be taken back to the full session in all its glory!

You can also close the session and then load it again, as the session will technically be the most recent session open you can open it quickly by using the shortcut Command_Shift_O (mac) CTRL_SHIFT_o (windows).


Final Words

As stated, this is not a huge production tutorial, instead a simple tool which may help when your run into plug-in based session issues.

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  1. Ryan
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  2. Arno
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