Did you know that you can use emojis and other symbols when naming tracks in Pro Tools, perhaps a gimmick but for some it may prove useful.

A post by Facebook user Joe Vezzetti in the PureMixers Facebook group highlighted us to the idea as he had shown the ingenious way to add arrows to tracks instead of having to write ‘OH Left and OH Right’ for example.

This may us wonder what if? So we played around with emojis and low and behold it’s possible to use them in Pro Tools for your tracks names, they even end up on audio files if you use them before you hit record.

How To Do It

To do it you need to use a couple if tricks, these are on an Apple Mac so if there’s a Windows user who wants to give the info for doing this on Windows then post it in the comments.

The first is a little known trick on a Mac for opening the emoji browser from the OS and search for any emoji. To do this simply hit CONTROL, COMMAND and the SPACE BAR at the same time and an emoji browser with search bar magically appears. You won’t be able to do this with Pro Tools in focus so open up Notes or any other app and copy and paste to and from that app into Pro Tools.

It can be a bit of a faff, but if you want to do it then it’s soon speedy.

What About Illegal Character Names?

We wanted to make sure this did not create files that could be viewed by Pro Tools as illegal characters so we checked with Avid. They have confirmed that they don’t see any issue with using emojis in filenames if a user wants.

As you can see, the symbols appear in all windows including the tracks listing on the left.

We also think it’s perhaps best to do this after recording the audio and during mixing otherwise you’ll have emojis all over your audio clips which could create some issues.

It’s mainly for fun and won’t make your audio sound any better, and of course be careful if you use a vomit emoji for a bad vocal.

Enjoy!