Transferring Markers from Izotope RX to Pro Tools

Earlier this year, I read Field Recordist Melissa Pons‘ fantastic articles, A Method for Organizing Field Recordings parts 1 and 2. Melissa presents us with her structured approach to field recording editing, from initial note-taking right through to the export.

Since reading the articles I have adopted several of Melissa’s practices. In particular her use of Izotope markers, the transfer of those markers to the DAW and the use of Time Of Day timecode to lay all of my recordings on a single track in chronological order.

However in the article Melissa uses Reaper. As a Pro Tools user myself I was frustrated (but not surprised) to find that there is no simple way to import .txt markers in to Pro Tools.

For this reason I’ve created a quick guide to a workaround using freeware EdiMarker from Sounds In Sync:

Step 1: Set Izotope time format to Source Timecode

Step 2: Export Marker File

Step 3: Edit the text file to delete the top 3 lines of text and save

*Update Dec 2020: With V2 of Edimarker this step is no longer necessary!

Step 4: Pull the text file into EdiMarker, selecting ‘Timecode’ and the relevant fps

Step 5: Select ‘Export MIDI’

Step 6: Set ‘Start Time of Pro Tools Session’ to 00:00:00:00

Step 7: Hit ‘OK’ and EdiMarker will generate a MIDI file alongside the text file

Step 8: Import the MIDI file into your Pro Tools session, either by dragging in below your track or using the Import>MIDI function

Thats it! Your markers should then populate as normal above your timeline. The only caveat is that you need to delete all your markers in order to pull in a new MIDI marker file – meaning that you can only edit one audio file at a time. (If anyone knows of a way around this, please let me know in the comments!)

Thanks again to Melissa for your articles – they’ve really helped me speed up my editing process!