Here is another community tip from this week’s podcast. It’s from Peter Kristensen and he suggests making shortcuts using a feature in the Mac OS and using some of the higher number F keys. He says….

We all know short cuts are essential to a faster workflow, and we all use shortcuts more or less - but my most used shortcuts are not the built-in Pro Tools shortcuts at all! Here’s the deal.

In order to get to ones “far away” functions in Pro Tools - meaning menu items that may be don’t even have a shortcuton a Mac we can go into Mac OS preferences, Keyboard, Application shortcuts , hit the plus sign, choose ProTools under Applications, then typing in the exact Menu item name (Space+Case sensitive) - and in the next field followed by the actual shortcut key and “Heeyyy!!!”, we now have a way of very fast way of getting to some otherwise slow operations. Obviously you don’t want to place a shortcut on a key where there’s already a shortcut, that would confuse everybody, but the F16, F17, F18 and F19 are not only handy placed on the right side of your keyboard, but also not in use.

In my examples you’ll see though, that sometimes it is handy to have a already “shortcut enabled” function also to appear on the function keys instead.  

• F16: Close all floating windows (Easy to remember, because the F16 is right above the little box an x on it (again only on mac) 
• F17: Toggle Show Clip gain line (Easy to remember, because the F17 is right above the = sign, which to me looks like two small clip gain lines…. 
• F18: Color Palette  
• F19: Toggle System Usage

Windows users don’t need to feel left out Neil has pointed us to an app called AutoHotKey to help with this kind of task.