User`s guide

Chapter 15: Working with Regions and Selections 199
When clearing audio files for multiple re-
gions, Pro Tools presents a warning dialog
for each audio file. To bypass repeated
warning dialogs:
■ Option-click (Macintosh) or Alt-click
(Windows) the Delete button in the Clear
Audio dialog. This permanently deletes
each successive audio file from your hard
drive (for each of the unused regions) with-
out any further warnings.
Use this “power delete mode” with care,
since deletion of these files cannot be un-
done.
Compacting an Audio File
In a disk-based recording and editing sys-
tem such as Pro Tools, disk storage is at a
premium. To help you get the most out of
your storage, the Compact Selected com-
mand allows you to compact audio files by
removing unused areas in order to con-
serve disk space. This is done by examining
a selected source audio file and rewriting it
to disk, irretrievably deleting any data that
has not been defined as a region.
If you have auto-created regions hidden in
your session, Pro Tools gives you the op-
tion of deleting any that are unused. If you
choose to delete them, all unused auto-cre-
ated regions are deleted at the same time.
▲ Because it permanently deletes audio data,
this Compact Selected command should be
used only after you have completely finished
your editing and are sure that you have no fur-
ther use for the unused audio data.
To ensure that you keep a particular auto-
created region, you can turn it into a user-
defined region by double-clicking it in the
Regions List and entering a name.
The Compact Selected command allows
you to “pad” the regions of the compacted
file by a user-selectable amount. You may
want to do this because Pro Tools requires
extra audio data before and after audio re-
gions in order to create crossfades. So, if
your regions have crossfades, or if you want
to pad the regions for the sake of any future
trimming, you should enter an appropriate
amount of padding (in milliseconds) to ac-
count for this.
▲ The Compact Selected command is de-
structive and cannot be undone! It perma-
nently alters the original audio files. There is
no way to recover data deleted with this com-
mand.
To compact an audio file:
1 Choose Select Unused >Regions from the
Audio Regions List pop-up menu. All re-
gions that have not been placed in a track
in the current session are highlighted in
the Audio Regions List.
2 To remove all of these unused audio re-
gions, choose Clear Selected from the Au-
dio Regions List pop-up menu. When the
dialog appears, choose Remove.
3 In the Audio Regions List, click on the re-
gion (or Shift-click to select multiple re-
gions) that you want to compact.
4 Choose Compact Selected from the Au-
dio Regions List menu.