Hate The Tape

This program is the bane of my existence. Ugh! Tape is the worst piece-of-crap software I have ever had the misfortune of using. And I’m forced into it. There’s just nothing else for printing cuesheets from Pro Tools.

The whole “OS X” support is a big effin’ joke. I have tried on 4 different computers and cannot get it to work. Full of bugs, never out of beta and I have to own it. It totally sucks.

For years I used this other awful piece of software called Track-It. Thankfully it is no more. Why can’t anyone write a real cuesheet program that works with Pro Tools?

Well today I discovered a handy little trick for Tape. Tape finally supports Pro Tools 5.1 sessions. (Don’t blink or look at it wrong or it might stop working. Crap ass software.) I forget when that was added in. Sometime in the last year I think. Even though Pro Tools 5.1 has been around for something like 3 years. Whatever. It’s bullshit. Anyway, Tape only works properly with SD2 Pro Tools sessions. Well, maybe it works with AIFF but it certainly won’t deal with Broadcast Wave—even thought it’s a perfectly legit sound file for Pro Tools 5.1. Like I said crap-ass software.

So here’s the way around it.

  1. Take your BWF Pro Tools 5.1 session. Open it and make sure it’s all set for cuesheets. Save if you need to and close it.
  2. Make a new Pro Tools session with SD2 as the file format. Make sure the bit depth and sample rate match your BWF session.
  3. Select “Import Tracks” (Pro Tools 5.1) or “Import Session Data” (Pro Tools 6) from the File menu. Highlight all your tracks for importing.
  4. Make sure you choose “Reference original media” for the audio. (Or whatever that pull-down menu says. I can’t remember the exact wording off the top of my head. Don’t use “copy” or “consolidate”.) And click “Ok” or “Import” or whatever that button is labeled.
  5. No audio should have been copied. If media was written, you probably didn’t use the same bit depth or sampling rate as the original. Start again at step 2.
  6. Save and close the session.
  7. Open it in Tape and print away.

Basically, it seems that Tape can’t deal with the “BWF” header in a Pro Tools 5.1 session. It only likes ones with an “SD2” header. However, you can mix and match supported audio formats in Pro Tools. So as long as you have an “SD2” session at the same bit depth and sample rate, you can import BWF audio into it without having to rewrite the media and Tape will print your cuesheets.

Stupid program.