For stereo and greater-than-stereo multichannel audio, Pro Tools supports both interleaved multichannel audio files and multi-mono audio files.
An interleaved audio file contains all channel information, stored in an alternating single audio “stream.” Interleaving distributes and “interleaves” the consecutive bits of data. This helps protect against consecutive errors when the data is read back.
Multi-mono, or “split-mono” multi-channel audio files are separate mono audio files that are treated together as a multichannel group of audio files. This lets you each channel (file) independently. For example, with stereo files, two separate files are created, where one file contains the left channel, and the other file contains the right channel. The files are identified by the suffixes of “.L” and “.R”. The two files are linked, and are edited as a pair in stereo tracks in Pro Tools. However, you can decouple them and split them to individual mono audio tracks in Pro Tools so that the can be edited, processed, and mixed independently.
You can change the Interleaved setting for the currently open session in the Session Setup window. When this option is enabled, all newly recorded or imported (and converted) stereo or greater-than-stereo multichannel files in the session will be interleaved audio files.