[MUSIC] Hi everybody, and welcome back to the studio. Since we've finished talking about MIDI and all the capabilities with Pro Tools, it's time to move on to audio. And once you have a full production filled with software instruments, and lots of them, it can tend to take a toll on your computer. And so a lot of producers will take their MIDI files or their software instruments and convert them into audio so it doesn't keep the computer trying to run all of these instruments at once. So I'm going to show you how to do that first, and then we can start working on some more audio techniques in Pro Tools. So you can see here I have the chord progression from our last lesson. And what we want to do is convert this MIDI data into audio so Pro Tools doesn't have to continually access Xpand in order for this to make sound. And overall it's going to make your computer run a lot faster. So here's the way that you do this. And you can combine multiple tracks together, or you can do each one individually. If you remember, on an individual track, you have that I/O section, which stands for Input / Output. And our input is obviously Xpand in this case. But in order to convert this to audio, we want to take our output and send it somewhere else. And ideally, we're going to send it to a new audio track which we can then do the conversion. So here's how we do it. If you click on the output of the track you want to convert into audio, you want to select new track. And this is different from the new track menu that we accessed with the shortcut, because this is actually going to create a path for the MIDI data to be converted directly into audio. Once you click this, you're going to see another new track dialog, and it's slightly different from the one you're used to seeing. First of all, you can see that you have your stereo option, your type of track you want to create, and also the name of whatever you want to call it. But the cool thing about accessing this particular menu is this is actually going to do all of the routing for you to convert your MIDI tracks into audio. So what I want you to do for the track type is choose an audio track, because that's what we want, ideally. And for the track name, you want to take the MIDI sound that you had already and just add audio to the end of it, just to differentiate between what's MIDI and what's audio. Since my sound is a pad synth, I'm going to call it PAD SYNTH AUDIO. And then click Create. And you'll notice that it's created a new audio track, and we can tell because it's blue. I'm just going to make this look a little bit bigger. You can see that the output of my pad synth MIDI track has been rerouted and created a virtual patch from the output of the MIDI into the input of this new audio track. And you can tell that that's been done because you see the same name on this output as you do on the input of the new audio track. Once you've done that, all you have to do is record enable your new audio track, and then press record. [MUSIC] Now as you can see, this has created a new audio region from the MIDI track. And don't be alarmed about the fact that this looks like it's really loud or the wave forms look like big blocks. If I go to the top right-hand corner of Pro Tools, you can see the small waveform. And if I hover over it, it says Audio Zoom Out. Click and hold and drag, and you can see a better representation of your waves if for some reason they look too big. Once you've done this conversion, you no longer have to see the MIDI in your edit window. And we can actually get it out of our view without deleting it. So if you right-click on the name of the MIDI track that we just converted to audio and choose Hide and Make Inactive, it's going to hide it out of our view, but it won't delete any of the data there. It also stops the synth from working, so it's going to make your workflow in Pro Tools easier because it's going to run a little bit more efficiently. And because we made this into audio, we can now hear it back exactly as it was when it was MIDI. [MUSIC] If you need to bring the MIDI track back for any reason, for example, if you want change something about it and do this conversion again. Go to the Tracks selector in the top left corner, and you'll see whatever MIDI track that you have hidden grayed out and italicized. If you click Show and Make Active, your track will come back and everything will be exactly the way that you left it. Since I don't need to see any more of this MIDI track, I'm going to hide it and make it inactive. And once you've taken all of your MIDI tracks from your productions and made them audio, it's time to start experimenting more with some of the audio functions in Pro Tools. [MUSIC]
