Importing stems form another DAW into pro tools HELP!!

[Jah Jah]

Hey,

So the answer to this question might be fairly straight forward but here we go. any help would be appreciated.

I have started to compose all my music in Ableton and then importing the stems in Pro Tools to mix with the tracked vocals which were recorded in Pro Tools.

When I import the stems everything seems good but the audio engineer in me started noticing that the transients of the waveforms imported don't match up precisely on grid. there is a 3-5 ms shift. Because Ableton doesn't show the instrument samples in waveforms but rather in blocks that are then placed on the grid I can't tell if the position of the transients in pro tools are actually correct or if I need to use elastic audio to snap those transients exactly to the grid as I thought they were in Ableton?

I attached a Jpg example to this thread to show what I'm talking about.

Purple channel is the imported audio using command+shift+I

Red channel is the same waveform except I drag it into the mix window, cut it at the transient, dragged it to the correct grid line and then entered the source Bpm with elastic audio. all stems i import have this shift. Am I just overthinking this and the imported audio is correct or do i have to to quantize the Pro Tools session.

NOTE: before exporting out if Ableton I did quantize all instrumentation. but again becasue the samples are in cubes/blocks and not waveforms i just assume the transients fall exactly on the grid lines. Thus why I'm thinking they should also fall exactly on the grid line in pro tools.


cheers

[The Weed]

Try sending/exporting - whatever it's called in Ableton - from zero, then bring the clips into Pro Tools and line them up at zero. Everything should then line up correctly.

[DonaldM]

I've had this issue with importing stems from others created on other than PT DAWs. I'm not sure what it is, but sometimes there is a bit of empty space that shouldn't be there. Typically, (at least for me), the amount of extra space is equal across all tracks imported from the same source. So, I just go into slip mode, zoom in on one track, and cut the extra away on all tracks and then revert to grid mode and realign to the first beat on the grid.



99.999% of the time, everything lines up perfectly when I do that.


As to WHY this happens, I've never been able to figure it out. And it doesn't happen all the time either. Its the oddest thing. I gave up a long time ago trying to solve it, and just take the extra minute to trim off the "fat" as it were and align the tracks.



I've had others download the same stems from the same source into a different daw, and there's no issue at all...on the very same stems. Its like something in transit to PT puts that little extra at the head of the track.



Have you tried going the other way to compare? Export an audio track from PT and import to Ableton, and see if the problem is there? I'll bet not.



Do you have another DAW you can import an audio track from to see if it happens there as well?

[Jah Jah]

Thanks so much for the feedback. I'll go back into the season, re import the stems and cut the phat off prior to the first transients of each track and then slip it into the grid alignment it should be at and see how it goes.

I export everything from zero in Ableton originally thats why i was curious about the shift. I have read that because there is so much dead space between transients on the stems imported PT has a hard time determining the source BPM and matching it to the session BPM in PT but I'm not to sure either. I just figured it would align correctly if the BPM of both DAWs stayed constant.

I don't have another DAW to do a cross reference on but again i'll give the trim the phat in slip mode a go instead of trying to elastic audio it.

[DonaldM]

Originally Posted by Jah Jah

Thanks so much for the feedback. I'll go back into the season, re import the stems and cut the phat off prior to the first transients of each track and then slip it into the grid alignment it should be at and see how it goes.

I export everything from zero in Ableton originally thats why i was curious about the shift. I have read that because there is so much dead space between transients on the stems imported PT has a hard time determining the source BPM and matching it to the session BPM in PT but I'm not to sure either. I just figured it would align correctly if the BPM of both DAWs stayed constant.

I don't have another DAW to do a cross reference on but again i'll give the trim the phat in slip mode a go instead of trying to elastic audio it.

Like I said earlier, I gave up a long time ago trying to figure why this happens. It just does. Remember you shouldn't have to trim one track at a time. My experience has been that if the stems are all exported from the same start point on the grid from whatever DAW they were created in, then the extra space at the front of the stems when imported into PT should be exactly the same on all tracks. So, I usually just enlarge the first imported stem, find the extra, and then, in slip mode, highlight the extra across ALL the tracks at once, and delete, and then realign back in grid mode.



Usually (like 99.99% of the time) everything is then in perfect sync.



Good luck!