MAutoAlign question

[Svama]

Hi all,

I'd like to align my Overhead with the kick in mic and the aligned kick in mic with my kick out mic, but the kick out not with the Overhead. How to set up auto align for this? Can I achieve it with one instance or do I need a second instance on both kick drums?

Soundradix autoalign uses sends and receives inside the plugin, so you just need one instance.

Thanks and greets,
Marek

[mibby]

I can't help with your plugin question, but I believe your logic is faulty. If A=B and B=C, then A=C. If I read your question correctly, you ARE trying to align your OH with your Kick In mic...
Kind regards,
Mike

[MeldaProduction]

I'd personally avoid doing that completely. Basically alignment makes only sense for mikes, that are close enough to each other, otherwise there will be so much ambience (even from a treated room), that it just won't make a difference anyways. Just align the 2 close mikes.

[Svama]

Is it possible to add a vertical line for the noise floor inside the graph, for easier set up? Something like the threshold line inside your compressors?

[MeldaProduction]

I'm afraid not, the metering section is a bit technically "impenetrable" by the internal engine. It wouldn't make too much sense to me anyways to be honest. In most cases you don't need to worry about this anyways, since the noise level is very low compared to the useful signal, it won't really mess with the analysis. It is only relevant for VERY noisy signals.

[Boone777]

I use Mautoalign on every recorded mics of the drumset. I'm doing it wrong I guess.
Would you align only kik mic in and out (group1) + snare top and bottom(group 2) + toms (group 3) what about hihat, room mic and OH ?

[steve2KVR]

...I think of MAA as a kind of "tone/color" plugin, and "how much" I align depends on how the resulting mix sounds...I've even aligned the kick and base on occasion...so, I'm not so sure about "doing it wrong" if you like the result...hth .../s~

[Svama]

A vid of another product, but great to see how to use alignment on drums

[mike_the_ranger]

A vid of another product, but great to see how to use alignment on drums

No Meldaproduction front but AutoAlign from SoundRadix works way better with all kind of material... I had to align drums from a band recording and after MAutoAlign it even sounded worse than before. More distortion and comb filtering was audible. The stereo field felt a bit messed up, too. SoundRadix did a much better job. Not perfect either but for example one can see the estimated time differences are more realistic to the recording situation with the SoundRadix plugin. I had the feeling MAutoAlign produced random delay values at one point In the end I ended up using the aligned SoundRadix tracks and slightly adjusted the align on a few tracks manually. And I have to say that this was the case for nearly all of the songs and instruments i've been dealing with.

[DocSnyder]

More distortion and comb filtering was audible. The stereo field felt a bit messed up, too. SoundRadix did a much better job. Not perfect either but for example one can see the estimated time differences are more realistic to the recording situation with the SoundRadix plugin. I had the feeling MAutoAlign produced random delay values at one point

Can you describe this some more? I wanted to test both products too and the engineers I talked to said similar things.

[mike_the_ranger]

More distortion and comb filtering was audible. The stereo field felt a bit messed up, too. SoundRadix did a much better job. Not perfect either but for example one can see the estimated time differences are more realistic to the recording situation with the SoundRadix plugin. I had the feeling MAutoAlign produced random delay values at one point

Can you describe this some more? I wanted to test both products too and the engineers I talked to said similar things.

Of course. If the time difference is not fully compensated it sounds horrible The comb filtering increases the smaller the difference is. So even a 1 sample delay has enormous effect on the audio. On some sources like snares or hats you'll hear this extremely. We had an old piano too where this effect stands out. If 2 mics which got panned left and right were not aligned the right way you'll notice a distorted stereo perception. The "random" values were more like MAutoAlign estimated 1/4x, 1/2x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x or 4x the actual distance and aligned it that way. Often mics pairs got estimated different distances. And I had the feeling when deleting the plugin an reinserting it, it showed other values than before. All in all from my experience it is either buggy or just doesn't work like it should You should test them both! But in our projects SoundRadix align gets more consistent and realistic results.

[steve2KVR]

...I've had somewhat similar results/experiences and I would experiment when/where in the tracks I was "sampling" and how many actual hits/events occurred during that sampling period. I've often thought using a very "sharp" pre-gate might help; maybe experiment in Mxxx. Never used the SR plug.../s~

[Svama]

Feels like, this was not a favorite of Vojtech, maybe he could do something. I get in the same trouble like others, it always feels and sounds thinner then before adding the plug

[Soundplex]

Feels like, this was not a favorite of Vojtech

In music we'd sometimes say "better do a good cover version than a bad own song". In this case it failed It's not a secret I'm against the whole melda copycat story. This is one reason why.

[MeldaProduction]

Feels like, this was not a favorite of Vojtech, maybe he could do something. I get in the same trouble like others, it always feels and sounds thinner then before adding the plug

Which host are you using? (same for everyone else, who experiences "random numbers") I'm on Cubase and I actually found it interesting how "always the same" the delays are. It could be a problem with the synchronization between instances, which is a rather peculiar problem.


NOW ABOUT DRUMS

I'm actually processing drums right now, so some experiences. It is always sort of about experimentation. I ended up aligning close mikes together (the real close mikes, like if I have 3 snare mics, then I align them together). But then I send the close mikes to group track, overheads to another group, rooms to another group, and align them together again. So it's like this:

Close 1 -> Align A -> Close mikes
Close 2 -> Align A -> Close mikes
Close 3 -> Align A -> Close mikes
OH 1 -> Align O -> OH
OH 2 -> Align O -> OH
Room 1 -> Align R -> Room
Room 2 -> Align R -> Room

Close mikes -> Align X -> Out
OH -> Align X -> Out
Room -> Align X -> Out

Now the "X" group is a rather specific thing as it sort of compensates for the delay between the hits. The problem here is that overheads and rooms are pretty much always so ambient (full of reflections), that aligning them to anything else is pointless, except for the fact, that since they pick up the sound much later than the close mikes, the it can even sound like 2 hits. So the X alignment merely makes the hit occur at the same time, which is the natural listening experience as opposed to the very unnatural recording using multiple microphones.


In general the problem is there is no perfect solution. Whenever you mix multiple mikes, it just will be there. No delay or inversion can ever make it perfect. It would only work in reflection-free space where there would be a single sound source of size 0, hence a singular point . So it is merely an estimate. The actual algorithm for getting this estimate is pretty simple and for devs it is pretty much the first thing to think about, so my guess is that the SR thingy uses the same one. So if there is some difference, my guess would be that there is some synchronization bug, or for example the "max delay" is set too high / too low.


As for copy cat: Sorry guys, that's silly, it's like saying that "there should be only a single equalizer - the first one ever" . Our stuff is partly cloned all the time, who cares, that's evolution .