Adjusting audio timing using technology - is the results acceptable?

[Speed_45]

Hey all!

Still a newbie here - pre-apology inserted here!

I have tried many different workflows (too many to recall all now) to try to utilize Elastic Audio to help me fine align the timing of some instrument tracks. The tracks are not horribly out of time or anything like that. But, I have to admit when all the instrument are fine timed, the overall mix does sound better - especially when target key ornaments where specific notes come together to synergize the moment.

My results is sometime different when using Elastic Audio (which makes it difficult to predict the outcome). When using on all acoustic instruments, in my case, I generally:

1) select consolidated audio clip in the track
2) turn on polyphonic
3) quantize (if possible) to a grid time or manually align one by one (which sucks when the analysis markers don’t auto locate the start of transients as expected (big misses on acoustic guitar)
4) fine align if quantize misses any or move the wrong direction on some transients
5) listen

I generally accept some “wobble” in the the audio playback here as the track is still in a real-time mode for polyphonic Elastic Audio (EA). I just listen for timing issues and adjust as necessary to get right

Then (as I have learned from some suggestions here), change the EA mode to X-Form to basically process the audio to a file or Render it so as to change from real-time to a file as normal. It’s at this point I believe I should expect to hear no “wobble” in the audio but, more times than not, I still do (not always on the same instrument or timbre of audio material- which is the mystery). Then if it does sound good, I commit the changes and turn off EA entirely. Sometimes I get “wobble” at this point also.

Sometime I don’t even go from polyphonic to X-Form at all .. just go directly to commit from polyphonic and commit timing changes then and the results can be better than going to X-Form first. But, not always, as at times the “wobble” from the real-time polyphonic alignment process doesn’t go away at all when committing.

Sometimes I swear I’m going crazy as one day I turn everything on and listen to the track and no “wobble”, next day I am working on another track or edit totally unrelated to the track that sounded great the day before and the “wobble” is there. I begin to wonder if the system resources / pro-tools environment settings are jerking with me. But, for mixing I have the max samples (2048) and a 2GB hard drive buffer cache setup as I’ve normally used for a while.

Having said all this (and I know that was a lot), has anyone else experienced the same or perhaps found workflows the work in a predictable manner and deliver quality results? If so, I am all ears... I have thrown a lot a time in flipping things on/off back and forth with audio quality that comes and goes.

I appreciate all feedback, comments or recommendations up to an including not using it, using something else (ex Logic FlexTime), etc.

As a footnote, I have also briefly tried melodyne’s time alignment feature but, that seems to take more time than EA manual alignment but, I have not spent a lot of time there to say I know 100% how to use it yet.

Thanks in advance!








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