Running live playback from Pro Tools: a practical setup

Most touring playback rigs are built on Ableton Live. That is not a matter of opinion — the training, the freelance labour pool and most of the published workflow material are all built around it, and if you are choosing a platform from zero with no other constraints, that is the well-lit road.

But a large number of shows run playback out of Pro Tools anyway, for good reasons: the stems were mixed there, the MD works there, the house engineer knows it, the session already exists and re-conforming it into another DAW is a week of work and a new set of mistakes. If that is your situation, Pro Tools is a perfectly capable playback machine. It just doesn't ship with the show-shaped conveniences the other road has.

This is the practical version: what to build, what to turn off, and what to rehearse.

What the rig actually has to do

Strip the job to its four outputs and it gets much easier to reason about:

1. Stems to the console — however many the mix needs, on fixed, labelled outputs.
2. Click to the band — usually the drummer and MD, never anywhere near the house.
3. Cues and utility audio — count-ins, intro voiceovers, samples that must not be mistaken for a stem.
4. Sync out — timecode to whatever else needs to follow: lighting, video, an operator display.

Everything below exists to make those four things happen at the right time and never at the wrong time.

The session template

Build it once, use it for the tour.

One session, all songs on one timeline, songs separated by markers. Loading a session mid-show is not a plan.

Fixed track order and fixed outputs. Stems in a stable order with stable output assignments, and the assignments written down somewhere that isn't the session. When a track shows up muted or silent on show day, you want to be able to compare against a written record rather than your memory of last week.

Click and cues live outside the stem block, visually separated, ideally in a different track colour, with output paths that physically cannot reach the main console feed. If a routing mistake can send click to the PA, it eventually will.

Sensible headroom on the stems. Playback stems arriving hot leaves the house engineer nothing to work with and makes every song a fight.

A count-in convention. Whether it is bars of click, a spoken count or a visual count, pick one and use it on every song. Drummers do not adapt well to a convention that changes at song 11.

Machine hygiene: the boring list that prevents most incidents

A show Mac is not a work Mac. Before the first show, and after every macOS update:

• A dedicated user account for shows. No mail, no messaging, no cloud sync clients logged in.
• Notifications off. A full-screen banner over your session at the top of the encore is a real thing that happens.
• Sleep and screen saver off for both display and system, on both battery and mains.
• Automatic updates off. Not deferred — off.
• Cloud sync paused for whatever folder the session lives in. A sync client re-indexing your audio files mid-show is a documented way to get dropouts.
• Spotlight excluded from the audio drive.
• Auto-backup off in the session for show day. The session is not changing; you gain nothing and risk a disk stall at a random moment.
• Buffer size raised. A playback-only rig has no live monitoring path to protect, so trade latency for stability.
• Battery and power. Mains, with the laptop battery healthy enough to survive a power blip. This is your real UPS.

None of this is exotic. All of it is on the incident list of anyone who has run playback for more than a season.

Sync: getting timecode out of Pro Tools

If anything else in the show has to follow the session — lighting, video, an operator display, a second machine — you need Pro Tools to generate timecode. The standard, free path on a Mac is MIDI Time Code over a virtual MIDI bus.

1. Bring the IAC driver online. Open Audio MIDI Setup (it ships with macOS), then Window → Show MIDI Studio, double-click IAC Driver, and tick Device is online. The default Bus 1 is enough. You do this once per Mac; it is the single most commonly forgotten step, because a MIDI bus that is offline looks identical to one that is online in every list except this window.

2. Point Pro Tools' generator at it. Setup → Peripherals… → Synchronization, and in the MTC Reader And Generator group set MTC Generator Port to the IAC bus. Leave MTC Reader Port alone — that is Pro Tools listening to the outside world, which is the opposite of what you want here.

3. Set the session start time and frame rate deliberately. Session Setup — give the session a start time that means something (many shows use 01:00:00:00) and a frame rate that everyone downstream agrees on.

4. Remember when MTC actually flows. Pro Tools generates timecode while the transport is rolling. Stopped, you get nothing but the occasional locate. A receiving device reading "stale" while you are stopped is normal, not a fault — which is worth knowing before you spend soundcheck debugging a working rig.

Transport discipline

The rig is now capable. The remaining risk is you.

One person touches the transport. Not "one person at a time" — one person.

Decide what the spacebar means. In a session where an edit window click can move the playhead, the spacebar is a loaded weapon. Turn off Options → Link Timeline and Edit Selection so that looking at something is not the same as arming it.

Know where you stop. The end of a song is a position, and it should be a marker, not a feel. Stopping "about there" every night is how you end up with a two-bar tail of the next song's count-in in the house.

Have a rule for the moment it goes wrong. Not a plan — a rule, one sentence, agreed with the MD in daylight. Something like: if playback stops mid-song, we do not restart that song; we go to the top of the next one on the MD's cue. Deciding this at 200 people-deep is not deciding, it is guessing.

Rehearse the rig, not just the songs

The things that break in a playback rig are rarely musical. Run these once, before the first show, with the band in the room:

• Pull the sync cable / disable the MIDI bus mid-song. What did the downstream devices do? Did anyone on stage notice?
• Stop in the wrong place and recover. How long does it take, in seconds?
• Move a song in the running order and run the transition either side of it.
• Hard-quit the playback app (not Pro Tools) mid-song. Did the audio survive?
• Unplug the display feeding the stage. Does the screen go black, or does it hold the last frame? A black screen on stage is worse than a stale one — musicians read a frozen screen as "unchanged", and a black one as "we are on our own".

Write down the times. "We recover from a mid-song stop in eleven seconds" is the kind of fact that makes a production director relax.

Where a tool comes in

Everything above is the rig. What Pro Tools does not give you is the show layer: a setlist with tonight's running order, a screen the band can read, and a stop that happens at the end of the song without a human finger on the spacebar.

Prossible is the piece we built for that layer. It runs on the same Mac as Pro Tools, reads memory locations over PTSL and follows position over MTC — the exact sync path described above, so if you have done this section you have already done most of its setup. It turns the markers into a setlist, drives a stage display with sections and bar countdowns, and arms an automatic stop on the song-end marker you placed yourself. The operator panel never sends a transport command you didn't ask for, and everything it does send is written to a time-stamped show log.

On the Pro tier it also serves that stage display to phones and tablets over the local network — up to 24 devices at once, browser only, nothing to install — and pairs a main and a backup Mac so your running order and per-song settings exist in both places. Promotion of the backup is a button someone presses, never automatic.

Requirements: macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon, Pro Tools 2023.6 or later with PTSL, on the same Mac.