When you are presented with a Pro Tools session from 2001 you think … easy, right ? But when you dig a bit deeper Digidesign and Avid and have had a love hate relationship with the old sd2 file type adding and then relinquishing support through version 10 and onwards. Avid brought back sd2 file recognition in 2020.9 (if my googling is to be trusted) but I’m sorry to say, in my 2025.12 it doesn’t really work !
It turns out sd2 files coupled with non permitted characters in a files names do not sit well with my 2025.12 versions of Pro Tools. I stepped back an old 2014 MBP to OS X 10.13 High Sierra, that was painful process but I need that OS so I could run PT 12.8.3 which I read online could open legacy sd2 sessions. However, 12.8.3 couldn’t cope with non permitted characters in audio file names, fail. Then I remembered I had a G5 iMac in the attic … Oh yeah !!
The iMac in the attic is a G5 1.8ghz PPC “beast 😆 ” running Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.5.8) with Pro Tools 8.0.1 LE, which is so old it needs to recognise PT hardware to run. Luckily I still had my “Digidesign” MBox 2 Micro knocking about. I copied the troublesome session over to the iMac’s boisterous 150GB HD 😆.
I knew all was good as soon as I opened the session folder, all the correct icons were present, the iMac knew these files. All my “newer” computers had no idea what these files were and so couldn’t display any icons.
Session loaded in Pro Tools 8 and I was able to do a “save as” converting all the files to Wav and utilising the Limit Character Set function to avoid the non permitted characters in the file names. In fact I was surprised how zippy PT8 worked on the old iMac. It saved the day and has been carefully put back in its bag in case it needs to return and save the day again, cape flapping in full retro Mac spec !
I guess the moral of the story is … always conform your Pro Tools sessions at the end, bounce files so you don’t need the plugins. It doesn’t feel like Wav is going anywhere soon but maybe a safety copy in AIFF is an extra layer of backup. I am sure every project will want to pay for this extra process !!
