Hi all, this is my first post here and I’m new to Auto Align.
I’m running the latest version in pro tools. However when I run Align, it seems that it’s often guessing the wrong track as the key track. I’m assuming this has now changed to “Performance time”.
For example, I tried it on some drums a client sent me today and it chose the floor tom as the track to base all other timings around. There isn’t even much floor tom in this track, I’d rather it used the snare or kick but I can’t seem to find a way to make it do this. Sure I can set the snare top as “Performance time” after aligning, but then I have to nudge the other tracks back and forth a lot as it’s moving some of them in front of my snare track which I don’t really want.
Can anyone help? What do you do when the algorithm chooses the wrong key track?
By default, Auto-Align sets all tracks relative to the earliest track in the group, called the Performance Time track. You can manually select a different one by right-clicking any track and selecting ‘Set as Performance Time.’
It’s important to note that tracks in a group aren’t simply aligned to the Performance Time track.
In AA2, every track in the group is analyzed and compared to all others based on shared information, with the Performance Time track serving as a time ‘anchor.’
When you change the performance time track, the sound of the group itself doesn’t change, you’re hearing the same alignment, relative to a different Performance Time track.
What does change is how the group’s track relates to the other tracks in the session, timing-wise.
I understand that the sound of the group remains the same within itself and that the Performance time track provides the anchor relative to the rest of the DAW session ( I did read the manual), however it seems to me that the algorithm isn’t always getting it right.
I just tried running it on a piano recording on which I used 4 sets of stereo mics. Align would act differently on different songs even though they were all tracked the same with the same settings and mic positions. (I didn’t stereo link or phase lock these mic sets in auto align in the end as this seemed to yield worse results - some of the spaced pairs probably needed aligning)
On some songs, auto-align would suggest that one of the most ambient mics was the performance time track, even though there is no way sound could reach these mics (about 10 metres away) before it reached the close mics (inside the piano), yet the algo didn’t detect this. This results in the ambient mics actually being moved in front of the close mics? Examining the waveform in pro tools also showed that indeed, the close mics do start earlier, so why is auto-align telling me it’s an ambient mic that starts first?
Similarly, with the drum example in my last post, there aren’t’ many floor tom hits in the track, yet somehow the algo has decided that this is the performance time track rather than the snare or kick. Again, on the pro tools tracks it certainly doesn’t look as though the tom mic is ahead of the kick or snare.
I suppose the bit I’m having trouble with is “Auto-Align sets all tracks relative to the earliest track in the group” yet, it doesn’t seem to be doing this. I can look at the waveforms in Pro Tools and clearly see that the tracks auto-align is selecting as the earliest, are not the earliest. For this reason I was wondering if there is a way to tell it which is the earliest or closest mic before it does its alignment calculations so that I have to do less fiddling about with the time align afterwards.
Of course there are many times when the algo is correct, but it seems to be getting things very wrong about half the time at the moment.
