In Kenny Gioia’s Pro tools videos he sometimes uses a program called QuicKeys for automating various tasks in Pro tools. Doing the keystrokes manually is time consuming and when its 4 or 5 button presses or menu options you tend to mess up. With automation software you can record every key press and replay it instantly. Quickeys is great, and its available for Mac and Windows, but…its $80, thats money that could be spent on mics and other recording gear.
There are other options, but I spent all Saturday morning trying out everything I could find, and none of them worked as well as Quickkeys.
Macro Express 3 worked ok.
I couldn’t get anything to quickly open an audiosuite plugin.
If anyone knows of one that works well with Pro Tools email me.
Not sure if you ran across this free macro tool for Windows but this is what I use for task automation with my DAW: http://www.autohotkey.com/ . I made one that snaps events together similar to Pro Tools “Shuffle” edit mode. Except I don’t use Pro Tools
. It’s not super intuitive and requires a little reading to figure it out but once you’ve created that script your done! Works great.