Sychronizing audio tracks recorded elsewhere

[cimoc]

A friend recorded eight tracks in an 8 channel minidisk, burned them to cd and gave them to me for remixing. What he did was set the left locator (whatever the equivalent of a left locator is in a minidisk) to 0, start playback from there, soloing each track and simultaneously burning to cd, and press stop at the end of the song. He repeated the process for each track. The cd burner is standalone (not connected to a pc, the kind that connects to a hifi system). Anyway, he managed to get 8 tracks of audio on cd, all roughly the same size and duration, and all starting at the same moment. All tracks are recorded for the full duration of the song (I mean, if there is silence somewhere within a track, he recorded silence, there are no pauses within a track, he only stopped between tracks to "rewind").

I have two problems.

a) the tracks do not align properly, although they are supposed to start at the same moment. I import them to Cubase SX2, with snap activated, but 3 of 8 tracks are very clearly away from the correct starting point. I would not think it possible, since the tracks have stayed in the digital domain all the way. The initial recording is ok, when he mixes in his own equipment, eveything sounds as it should.

b) The tempo is very unstable. I want to add sequenced material. I guess my best bet is to use the "merge tempo from tapping" feature, but I am not the best at tapping to tempo, and there is not a clear drum track to tap to (there are some wild ethic percussions, but like I said, they fluctuate badly). I suppose it can be done by tapping and editing the tapped notes, but it seems like too much manual work. The warp tool looks to me even harder to get proper results.

If anyone can come up with some good advice, please help out!

(Sorry for the long post, I wanted to make sure the situation comes through).

[kingpisser]

Cimoc,

I had a similar query sometime ago. Managed to use Cubase SX2 to solve it.

First off, trim the silence from the beginning of the audio tracks. Turn the metronome in Cubase on.

Then, mute all tracks apart from your drum track. Step 1 - Line the start of the FIRST bar of the audio file with the SECOND bar of cubase. This way, you can include whatever fade-ins and buildups you have.

Step 2 - At the 2nd bar in Cubase, insert a tempo change. Then use the Warp tool to line up the 3rd bar of Cubase with the 2nd bar of the audio track. See if it lines up and sounds in sync with the metronome.

Step 3 - Then listen to each bar and check for sync. If you find loss of sync, go to the LAST IN-SYNC BAR, and insert a tempo change. Let us call this the (n)th bar.

Line up the (n+1)th bar with the next bar on the audio file using Warp.Repeat Step 3 for all future bars until you have synced all the bars in the audio file.

Mind you, you do not have to do this for every bar. Just when you find a bar going out of sync. The metronome is invaluable here.

When the percussion track is done, you can unmute all your other tracks. Line them up with the 2nd bar in Cubase (1st bar of the drum track).

Whew

I hope that reply was coherent and useful to you.

Cheers

[kingpisser]

P.S.

And for God's sake, turn Linear timebase on, not Musical timebase.

Cheers

[cimoc]

Thanks a lot, kingpisser!

I understand what you are saying, though I am not sure I will get some results before I start banging my head on the wall . I am going to try it anyway, but probably over the weekend, because I don't have enough time during workdays to finish it in one or two sessions.

I love kvr!!

[Rere]

I had the same problem with tracks out of sync, back when I started with digital recording with a DAT, some 10 years ago.
I couldn't figure out why it happened, coming from the same machine, same digital clock, but eventually learned that even in the same clock there are slight time differences (jitter) between where each sample is supposed to be (44100/s or whatever) located in the timeline.
So even if the recordings start at the exact same place and they seem to align pretty well for some measures, they will unavoidably start to drift apart, as this diferences start to sum up.
My only solution to this problem back then were to split each track (already lined in the multitrack editor) every certain number of measures and manually realign every time I felt they were drifting, making crossfades and...well...a terrible time consuming and good ears demanding task.
But I can't think of another way right now out of my experience.

Rere

[kingpisser]

The best option then would be to trim the files and import them into Ableton Live. Set the Warp markers to each beat ( ) and re-render them individually.

Failing this, Cubase VST/32 and Logic PC have similar options where you can quantise the audio content to match a time signature.

Peace

[cimoc]

Well, if I can set a marker at the beginning of each and every bar with enough precision, then all the hard work is done, I guess. I can do the rest in SX in a few minutes (like inserting a midi note in every marker and using the "merge tempo from tapping" function to create a propper tempo track. Then everything is simple.

I think I will try both this and your first suggestion in the initial 8 bars of the song and see which one works better.

I have neither Ableton Live nor Logic, but I think SX should be adequate. I think...

Anyway, thanks for the help again, everyone.

Cheers

PS come to think of it, maybe some ouzo will help with the warping stuff

[kingpisser]

PS come to think of it, maybe some ouzo will help with the warping stuff

Mavrodaphne does the trick too.....