When Avid introduced Folder Tracks in 2020, it streamlined session organisation in many ways. While the Auxiliary Inputs and VCAs they to some extent replace are still useful, and to many necessary, Folder Tracks are so convenient that for many they have been a gift we didn’t appreciate how much we needed until we got it. In this free tutorial, brought to you with the support of Avid, we take a whistle stop tour of Folder Tracks. Both how and why to use them by looking a 5 Ways Folder Tracks Are Awesome!

Basic Vs Routing

There are two types of Folder Track in Pro Tools. Basic and Routing. They both share the same ability to help organise and navigate sessions by opening and closing the Folder Track to hide or reveal the member tracks. The Routing Folder adds the audio input and output of an Aux Input track, along with a fader and member tracks can be, but don’t have to be, routed through this fader for audio summing and processing as well as level control.

Solo Logic

Beyond visual management of the tracks in a session, one of the biggest conveniences brought by Folder Tracks is the way the Solo button works. When a Solo button is hit, all other tracks which aren’t also in solo are muted. This ‘implied mute’ is denoted by the tracks’ mute buttons switching to a faded orange. The way to exclude tracks you don’t want to be muted is to Solo Safe them by Command-clicking the Track’s Solo button as is often done on effects returns.

When using a Routing Folder, soloing the folder solos the member tracks, as you would want. To achieve the same thing using an Aux Input would require a decision to either Solo Safe a submix’s Aux or the member tracks. When using a Folder you no longer have to do this. This is one of those small things which makes life so much easier!

Folders - Not Just For Audio

Basic Folders are purely organisational. You can put collections of tracks, including other Folders in them and speed up your session navigation enormously. To help keep track of activity from the hidden tracks a Basic Folder has a set of very minimal meters which as well as indicating audio output also show MIDI activity. The fact that MIDI can be included in Folder tracks extends to Routing Folders too.

If you are used to the ‘old’ way of creating submixes by routing collections of tracks to an Aux, it might not occur to you not to route everything in a routing folder to the Routing Folder track. However you don’t have to and MIDI can’t be routed to a routing folder anyway. The audio level meter on a Routing Folder track will show audio from member hidden tracks but the inclusion of the little activity meters on Routing Folder tracks shows MIDI and audio which isn’t routed to the Routing Folder track.

Showing And Hiding Tracks In Folders

You can of course do this by clicking with the mouse but that’s slow. Instead use the keystroke Shift+F to toggle a Folder Track or use the modifier keystrokes with the mouse to toggle multiple Folder Tracks. Option/Alt Toggles all the Folders in your session and option/Alt+Shift toggles selected Folders. Command (Control on a PC) toggles the whole folder structure and Option+Command (Alt+Control on a PC) toggles nested folders from the clicked layer down.

The integration with Eucon control surfaces is tactile and simple, just like VCAs it is possible to spill out member tracks across the surface. Absolutely transformational if you haven’t experienced this way of working before. Folder Tracks haven’t replaced Auxiliary Inputs and VCA Masters but they have made them only one of the options and frequently Folders are the right way to go. When it comes to showing and hiding tracks, Folder Tracks provide a way to control track visibility which is so much more intuitive that using memory locations that I’ve pretty much abandoned that way of working.