Getting comfortable in standalone mode - Pro Tools Tutorial

- [Instructor] All right, so we're going to spend most of our time here in this course in Standalone mode. And there are a few reasons for this. I'm aware that many Pro Tools users, and many Logic users, people who spend most of their time in music or in a DAW are not accustomed to using a standalone piece of software like this, but I assure you there are payoffs, and let's talk about them. Just so you know, all of these modules over here on the right hand side, most of them at least, are available as AudioSuite in Pro Tools, so you can do stuff with stuff that is in your arranger, same with Logic. So we're going to talk about techniques here that do carry over. The reason why we're talking about Standalone mode is because we have some tools in front of us that are very, very helpful and some analytical tools that are just good for staying organized. The processing is much faster, and also the workflow is really amazing. So in this main window here, when we open it up, we have kind of an open playing field and if we go ahead over to our Finder and just drop in a piece of audio, for example, you can also click on that Open folder icon if you want, we have our main audio view here. This is the standard, the famous iZotope spectral view, that is very futuristic and very useful. On the right hand side, we have these modules, which are very handy. Up at the top, you can create a module chain if you want. We also have different subcategories of modules, which are very handy because sometimes I'll be going through things and I'll say, "Hey, look I'm striking out with de-noising one or two ways. Let me just see what they have in the de-noise category. Oh, I forgot to check out Dialogue Isolate. This is super useful." So that's one thing that's nice with the workflow, we've got a lot of different tools here that are very handy. This Repair Assistant button up here, which we'll talk about. We have our zoom controls, horizontal and vertical, very handy. We can fade back and forth between spectral and just waveform, little graphics intense there. And then we've also got our cursors down here. If you click the hand, you're just going to scrub through. If you click on the magnifying glass, you're going to magnify. I tend to leave none of them highlighted because then it goes back and forth. It switches to this selector tool, and then I can use the hand to move the selection, and I find that works really well. And if you, for example, if you zoom all the way out and then you double click, you've got the entirety of your clip there that you're listening to, and it will loop. Let's just go over to the Preferences and take a look. I've got my output device set to what I'm actually listening through. Again, we're not embedded inside of a DAW, so make sure you set your output device to be going through your interface or wherever you have your headphones or speakers plugged in. Once you've got that all set up, hit OK. You can check your audio just by hitting the space bar to hit play. Very intuitive, just like your DAW. ♪ Come dance with me ♪ - [Instructor] There's a little preview you get. I've got a little piece of audio here that I recorded as a demo with my friend Kate K-S, who's a terrific singer. And the recording leaves a little to be desired, so this is sort of exactly the situation you want, good performance, but with some audio cleanup to do. At the bottom, we've got a meter and we've got some information about our audio. So once you've got that set up in Standalone mode, you're just about ready to go. One thing that I will mention for saving is that I like to do a Save as right off the top and go ahead and make a folder for my cleaned up audio for whatever session I'm working on, because as you start to make changes, the Save button will be available to you and that does overwrite the file that you're working with on your machine.