Pro Tools: Locating Missing Files

Heartbreaking. Worse, the most common reasons for files being missing won’t be helped by the Automatically Find & Relink option!

There’s nothing more dispiriting than opening a session only to see the Missing Files error. We show you how to find your audio again!

Opening a Pro Tools session and encountering the Missing Files dialogue box can be alarming, but there’s no need to panic. This situation can occur if you’ve moved to a different computer, disconnected a hard drive or reorganised your sample library, causing Pro Tools to lose track of where certain files are located. The default option Pro Tools offers is to automatically find and relink those missing files, but in my experience this isn’t the best choice. It depends on why the files are absent, but for the kind of work I do, when a file is reported missing, it’s probably not on the system any more. Automatic relinking can be a very slow way of confirming what I already suspect. A more targeted approach is often better.

Missing In Action

The first thing I do when faced with the dreaded Missing Files message is to select Skip All and check out the session to see exactly what’s missing. If all you’re missing is an alternative take that isn’t being used anyway, then you’re probably good to go. If you can’t see anything obviously missing on the timeline, the first place to look is in the toolbar. At the bottom of the Main Counter section, you’ll see the Timeline Data Online Status and the Session Data Online Status indicators. If anything is missing then one or both of these will be red. If the Timeline status indicator is red, you have a missing clip on the timeline; if the Session indicator is red, you have a missing clip in your Clips List.

The two red icons underneath the Main Counter indicate that a file is missing from both the timeline and the session data.

Assuming you have a missing clip on the timeline, look at the Clips List in the right‑hand sidebar of the Edit window. Be aware that audio files on your drives, as opposed to sub‑clips of those files, appear in bold. Any missing files will appear in italics. If you’re wondering how they can have gone astray, one of my most helpful pieces of advice is to avoid doing anything to your session folders outside of Pro Tools. For example, don’t tidy up your Audio Files folders using Finder or Windows Explorer; do it from within Pro Tools, or you’ll be doing the equivalent of putting the washing up away in someone else’s house — they won’t be able to find anything!

If you have reason to think that the file is mislaid rather than unavailable, and you have a good idea where it’s going to be, a manual relink will be faster than the automatic option....