Forward Audio releases faSmartAlign — automatic multi-mic alignment for drum kits (Mac/Win, VST3/VST2/AU/AAX)

[forwardaudio]

Hi all,

I'm Daniel from Forward Audio. faSmartAlign is out today, and since a lot of you here
record and mix real kits, I wanted to post it where the people who'll actually push it hard
can poke holes in it.

The short version: you load one instance per mic, and the plugin works the whole kit as a
single system instead of one track at a time. It reads each track name to figure out the
instrument, groups the matching mics together across the session, and solves three things
at once for that group:

1. **Alignment** — time offset and polarity, with four modes (Balanced, Transient, Energy,
Wide Stereo) depending on whether you care most about the snap, the body, or the stereo
image of the overheads.
2. **Phase EQ** — frequency-dependent phase correction on top of the time move. A single
delay never fully fixes a multi-mic snare because the error isn't constant across the
spectrum; this does the part a sample slip can't.
3. **Gate** — currently drums-only. It sets its own open threshold from the bleed it measures
on the track and its release from the actual hit energy, and it flips snare-bottom polarity
on its own when the measurement says to. Cymbals, hi-hats, overheads and room mics get
auto-bypassed so it doesn't chew on the stuff you don't want gated. Broader instrument
coverage is on the roadmap — I'd rather name the scope than hide it.

The part I haven't seen elsewhere: every instance shares its analysis with the others, so a
13-mic kit is solved as one connected array rather than 13 independent guesses. On ARA hosts
(Studio One, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper) it reads your existing regions directly — no separate
capture pass. On everything else it does a short capture pass first. None of it runs off
presets; every decision comes from what's on your tracks, and re-analysis is repeatable.

**Formats / OS:** VST3, VST2, AU and AAX, Mac and Windows. ARA is VST3-only.

**Price:** $139 intro through July 20, then $179. One-time, no subscription. There's a free
demo — full quality, watermarked, no time limit — so you can run it on a real session before
deciding.

Product page and demo:
https://www.forward-audio.com/products/ ... rum_thread

I'll be in the thread today and over the weekend — fire questions, edge cases, weird mic
setups, whatever. If you break it on a kit, that's exactly what I want to hear.

— Daniel, Forward Audio