The I/O Setup window, like so many parts of Pro Tools, has been developed over the years and the development process is worthy of telling because it helps to explain how we have got to where we are today. Don’t skip this article as it not only explains how the I/O Setup window used to work but how it works now.
Pro Tools 8 And Earlier
In any Pro Tools system before 8.1, the I/O settings were always part of the session file. They were only stored and recalled from the session. When opening a session created or edited on another system, any studio (system) settings for your system would be overwritten by the settings stored with that session file.
Pro Tools 9 to Pro Tools 11
When Pro Tools 9 was released in 2010, Avid separated the I/O Settings with Input, Output, Insert, Mic Preamps, and H/W Insert Delay settings to become system settings. Those settings were stored with the system and the session file and could be recalled from either.
When opening a session created or edited on another system, you could choose whether or not the I/O settings stored with the session would overwrite the I/O settings stored with your system, with a checkbox at the bottom of the I/O Setup window.
It was also at this point that Avid added a second type of bus. There have always been internal Mix Busses and to handle the separation of System and Session I/O Settings, Avid created an additional set of busses. With Pro Tools 9, when you selected an output you were actually selecting a bus and then in the Bus tab of the I/O Setup window, you could determine how these output busses were routed to your actual hardware outputs.
You might consider this like your patchbay on your analogue desk. To re-assign a desk output you would cross patch it so that, for example, output 1 could now feed track 8 on your multi-track. This also meant other changes were made like when you selected an interface output, the dropdown menu no longer said Interface as you can see on the left-hand side of the image below but now says Output as you can see on the right-hand side of the image below.
From Pro Tools 9 to Pro Tools 12, even when the Session Overwrite box wasn’t checked and you opened a session from a different studio, you still wouldn’t get any sound, when you first opened the session. But at least it was a single trip to the Bus tab of the I/O settings window to change the Mapping To Output option to match the outputs that you use for monitoring the output of Pro Tools rather than the tedious process of having to change the routing on every track.
In addition, at this point, to help in the remapping process, Avid added the option to Show Last Saved Setup, so that you could see how what came with the session differed from the setup you have in your studio.
Pro Tools 12 And Later
And there it stayed until Pro Tools 12 was launched in March 2015, when Avid improved the I/O Setup window again. These changes had a lot to do with separating, even further, the difference between session related settings and hardware (system) related ones.
With more and more sessions ‘travelling’ from different systems with different configurations, some just stereo, some surround, some mixed in-the-box and some routed track by track to a console or summing amp, anyone working in this kind of workflow would still spend much more time than they would like in the I/O Setup window reconfiguring before they could even play anything. Wouldn’t it be nice if the I/O labelling and routing for your hardware could be left alone? With Pro Tools 12, Avid added a number of features to achieve this goal.
They realised that your hardware is a static device with physical connections, whereas sessions each have different bussing arrangements and so are much more fluid. So in Pro Tools 12, Avid added a Monitor Path indicated by a small studio monitor icon. This Monitor Path became a special type of mapped output, dedicated to your monitoring path.
The clever part, designed to save much of the grief described above, is that Pro Tools is now designed to assign to the monitor path of any new system that session travels to, meaning that it is more than likely when opening a session from another system, audio will be heard straight away, rather than needing a nervous visit to the I/O Setup Window to sort out why there is no sound.
Automatic Downmix Built-in
What is even cleverer, is that it doesn’t matter if you are trying to open a 5.1 session on a laptop using the built-in sound card. Pro Tools compares the output mapping of the session you were opening and the system settings on the system you were opening and automatically adds a downmix option so that, for example, you could seamlessly work on a 5.1 session, even though you only had a stereo monitoring path.
This is because the I/O Setup mappings are saved both with the Last Used .pio file (Pro Tools I/O settings file) as well as the session or project file, all of which helps to give the system a memory of sessions from other systems.
Output Mapping In The Pro Tools I/O Setup Window
It is well worth understanding how the bus to output remapping works because once you understand how it is designed to work and work with it, it will save you countless visits to the I/O Setup window in the future. In the next article, Output Mapping In The Pro Tools I/O Setup Window, we lift the lid on Mapping Outputs To Buses In the Pro Tools I/O Setup Window.