A few Auto Align 2 ARA issues / questions

[SnugRecording]

Hi all,

I'm having a few issues with Auto Align 2 and I'm not sure if any of this is expected behaviour or not. Tbh, I'm not sure how much the ARA workflow is proving to be a timesaver for me because of these...

1. In the video showing off the AA2 ARA integration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSVR8DAMZFw), it shows that you can right-click your clips and choose "Render" - not in my experience! I've got Edit and Bypass, but Clear and Render are both greyed out. I've never seen either as a working option. Anyone shed any light on the behaviour of the Render and the Clear options? When should I be able to use them?

2. Related to the above, since my only option to commit the alignment (and avoid every 5-10mins getting a "Saving ARA Data" progress bar) is to turn off the ARA slot... Opt+click or Opt+Shift+click doesn't seem to work for removing Auto Align 2 from the ARA slot. Works fine for Melodyne, not for AA2. I'm literally having to switch every track, one by one, to 'None' in order to commit my phase alignment.

EDIT: This seems to be related to playlists - if I activate AA2 in the ARA slot, then duplicate the playlist with the clips that are now being processed by AA2, then I get this behaviour. Obviously, I can try to avoid this in my workflow and get in the habit of immediately committing my AA2 alignments before getting distracted by any other editing. It's still weird though - I would expect to still be able to opt+click to turn AA2 off on all tracks with the assumption that if I commit or revert, it will operate on all ARA processed clips on all playlists.

3. When I go through and remove AA2 and can see the waveforms - sometimes I'll notice that it's really shifted something a bit too far for my liking and want to undo. When I undo, it puts AA2 back in the ARA slot, but when I open it, all the alignment settings have been reset, so it's kind of dangerous having an undo option for that in some ways. I think it should at least have a warning that all it's doing is turning AA2 on again, not truly getting you back to where you were before you committed.

To give a bit more info, I'm on Sonoma 14.5, PT 2024.6 (obvs) on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Latest installer for AutoAlign 2

How is everyone else finding AA2 on ARA and does anyone have any tips for best practice when it comes to the workflow? Currently I'm sort of feeling like it's not really much quicker / better than using the plugin version but maybe I just need to get used to it.

[gives]

Originally Posted by SnugRecording

Hi all,

I'm having a few issues with Auto Align 2 and I'm not sure if any of this is expected behaviour or not. Tbh, I'm not sure how much the ARA workflow is proving to be a timesaver for me because of these...

1. In the video showing off the AA2 ARA integration (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSVR8DAMZFw), it shows that you can right-click your clips and choose "Render" - not in my experience! I've got Edit and Bypass, but Clear and Render are both greyed out. I've never seen either as a working option. Anyone shed any light on the behaviour of the Render and the Clear options? When should I be able to use them?

2. Related to the above, since my only option to commit the alignment (and avoid every 5-10mins getting a "Saving ARA Data" progress bar) is to turn off the ARA slot... Opt+click or Opt+Shift+click doesn't seem to work for removing Auto Align 2 from the ARA slot. Works fine for Melodyne, not for AA2. I'm literally having to switch every track, one by one, to 'None' in order to commit my phase alignment.

EDIT: This seems to be related to playlists - if I activate AA2 in the ARA slot, then duplicate the playlist with the clips that are now being processed by AA2, then I get this behaviour. Obviously, I can try to avoid this in my workflow and get in the habit of immediately committing my AA2 alignments before getting distracted by any other editing. It's still weird though - I would expect to still be able to opt+click to turn AA2 off on all tracks with the assumption that if I commit or revert, it will operate on all ARA processed clips on all playlists.

3. When I go through and remove AA2 and can see the waveforms - sometimes I'll notice that it's really shifted something a bit too far for my liking and want to undo. When I undo, it puts AA2 back in the ARA slot, but when I open it, all the alignment settings have been reset, so it's kind of dangerous having an undo option for that in some ways. I think it should at least have a warning that all it's doing is turning AA2 on again, not truly getting you back to where you were before you committed.

To give a bit more info, I'm on Sonoma 14.5, PT 2024.6 (obvs) on an M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Latest installer for AutoAlign 2

How is everyone else finding AA2 on ARA and does anyone have any tips for best practice when it comes to the workflow? Currently I'm sort of feeling like it's not really much quicker / better than using the plugin version but maybe I just need to get used to it.

I'll take a look later, but I am on Ventura for good reason. Their support team is a very good team there IMHO. Let them know and they will respond. I have been using Melodyne and VocAlign Pro 6 with no issues so far. I use Auto Align Post 2 also.


G

[SnugRecording]

Just a quick update to my original post after Sound Radix reached out to clarify a few things (Oran who reached out was very helpful).

1. The video I posted above is indeed incorrect - the Render and clear options were from a previous version of AA2 which was used for testing. The release version has no option to Clear or Render. If you want to 'clear' the AA2 processing from a clip then you just have to use the Bypass and Un-Bypass commands.

2. This was connected to the problem I was having being unable to opt+click and select 'None' in the ARA slot to commit all my tracks. It seems that the order I was doing things was the problem. I was opening AA2 in the ARA slot on all tracks, doing my alignment, then (so that I had a backup without alignment) I would duplicate the playlist and bypass AA2 on those duplicate clips. That's what seems to break the ability to opt+click and select 'None' in the ARA slot. I have to click each track one at a time in this case. I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected behaviour but it certainly isn't documented anywhere I could find.

3. This is just the way the ARA slot works apparently - if you commit and undo, you lose your settings

SO - I've come up with a few workflow tips to avoid most of the problems I was having and I'll post it here in case it helps anyone else avoid these issues biting them in the ass.

1. Duplicate your Playlist so you've got a backup BEFORE opening AA2 in the ARA slot - Once you've opened AA2 editing on a clip, there is no way to make an unprocessed backup playlist without either removing it from the entire track's ARA slot, reverting changes and starting again, or running into the problem I had where I couldn't remove all instances of AA2 at once.
2. Once you've got your backup playlist, open AA2 and perform alignments as normal.
3. Once you think you're happy with the alignment, remember to export the alignment file via the settings menu in AA2, as there is no way to get those settings back with the undo command if you find that once you commit, something has moved too far, etc.
4. Remove all AA2 instances from the ARA slot and commit.

Hope this makes sense and maybe helps someone.