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Archive for July 12th, 2010

Synchro Arts VocALign Project 3

[ 0 ] 2010/07/12

Originally developed for film audio post-production work, VocALign has been in circulation as a plug-in and standalone program for about 15 years now, and it revolutionised the way dubbed dialogue is aligned to the original recorded speech.

It freed the actor from trying hard to lip-sync, enabling them to focus on expression, safe in the knowledge that VocALign would tighten words to the action afterwards.

Application in the music world was clear: double tracks, backing vocals and harmonies could be aligned to the lead vocal to create a very tight group, clearing up those annoying flutters from multiple 'ess' sounds, for example.

Now, with VocALign Project 3, it's also available in VST3 format, for use with Cubase and Nuendo.

What VocALign actually does is a simple trick that, as any audio professional will tell you, it is very adept at, and it can save hours - if not days - of tedious manual work. The old-school alternative is to either do take after take until the vocal timing is tight, or to laboriously edit the backing vocal tracks, cutting up words and stretching single consonants into time with the lead, or more likely a lot of both.

VocALign takes two audio signals: the guide, which in most cases is the lead vocal, and the dub, which is the backing vocal or harmony that you want to lock to it. It analyses the energy profiles over time of both signals and stretches and compresses the dub track to precisely follow the profile of the guide.

You can refine the start and end points of the section you want to align to avoid it getting confused by extraneous noises/words and audition the results before committing to a fresh 'VocALigned' track.

VST3 for all

So how exactly does VocALign work in Cubase? As we said, VocALign needs two signals to work its magic: the guide signal, which provides the template to which the second dub signal is aligned.

To achieve this, a VocALign instance is inserted on the dub channel. From the guide channel, an auxiliary send is routed to VocALign's VST3-enabled sidechain input. You'd then play the section to be aligned with the Capture Audio button engaged. When the transport is stopped, the two waveforms will appear in their respective windows and after hitting Edit, a visual representation of the alignment is traced over the guide.

Play the section again to hear the resultant aligned track instead of the original. If needs be, you can refine the section to be aligned using the start and end arrows. Once you're happy, you can bounce the aligned dub signal onto a fresh track using Cubase's mixdown functions.

Magic bullet

It performs the alignment process in seconds and the results are astonishingly good. Compare this to the hours it can take to edit parts into line by hand - even then, the results are often a tad out of focus!

If time is money, you would recoup your investment in a matter of weeks. VocALign doesn't always get it right, and you occasionally have to do a bit of refinement either to the length of the target section or the content of what you're aligning, but it happily manages four or even eight-bar phrases in one go.

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Iced Audio AudioFinder 5

[ 0 ] 2010/07/12

AudioFinder is an audio file organiser that supports a range of audio formats, including WAV, AIFF, REX, MP3 and FLAC. It features a file browser, audio preview (with a virtual keyboard and MIDI control), basic sample editing, batch processing/renaming and much more.

Version 5 introduces yet more features, but the most important is undoubtedly the metadata database. Previously, it was possible to organise your sounds into basic 'playlists' for easy access and organisation. Now Iced Audio has added extensive labelling options in the form of metadata.

Processing power

Once you've selected a file, you have access to basic audio editor processes such as gain, normalisation, 'mono-ise', etc. Pitch Analyser is a particularly valuable feature, analysing the file and presenting the results as coloured bars on a frequency scale, with the red bar representing the fundamental frequency. Once you've got your samples tagged up with their fundamental pitch, you can then find a kick to suit the key of your bassline, and so on.

AudioFinder also supports AU/VST plug-ins, so you can preview your file through an effect (only one at a time, mind), and commit to your choice by rendering to a new file - it's all very fast and intuitive.

A most useful feature of AudioFinder is its Sample Extractor, which is used to extract multiple samples from a single audio file. It splits the files automatically, using a volume threshold to dictate where the files are split and a new sample is created.

There are also fade in and out options, and you can set a maximum on the number of samples to create, to give the extractor further guidance. It's especially useful for extracting samples from old-school sample libraries that came on audio CDs, or pulling out the useful parts of field recordings.

We also had some success splitting up the hits in drum loops. The Power Rename feature will be of prime interest to those who create their own samples from scratch, and indeed, professional sample library creators. Features include find/replace of filenames (eg, find "bassdrum" and replace it with "Kick_Drum") and the addition of a prefix/postfix, and it can even automatically add the detected pitch and MIDI note number, which is highly useful for making multisampled patches.

Add in neat touches like the BPM detector, micro-harmonic sound comparison (to compare frequency distribution of two files), visual waveform preview, drag-and-drop of selected audio sections into your DAW, batch processing and renaming, Mac Finder integration and free updates for life, and it seems crazy not to pick up AudioFinder.

AudioFinder really is a boon for anyone who works with samples and a must-have for professional producers. The more you dig into it, the more you appreciate what it can do, and unless you don't actually use samples at all, we can't think of a single reason not to buy it.

Search you later, metadata

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MOTU Ethno Instrument 2

[ 0 ] 2010/07/12

MOTU launched the original Ethno ROMpler in 2006 as a plug-in/standalone combination that proved a very convenient way of accessing a variety of exotic sounds.

Some of that material came from previously released sample titles and this remains the case, but Ethno now offers 21GB of content spread across three DVDs, as opposed to the original's 8GB.

The Ethno GUI is still conveniently contained in one window, and its mildly eccentric design remains a matter of taste. One instance of Ethno will now play as many parts as your system can handle, so 'scenes' consisting of many layers of instruments can be rapidly configured within the plug-in. Typing in the browser window will quickly locate material - a handy new feature.

As with v1, the sounds fall into two basic categories: Instruments, this time offering 875 playable multisampled patches; and Loops and Phrases, totalling 7600. The instruments are African, Asian, European (including Spanish, Eastern and Celtic), Caribbean and Australian in origin, and there are vocal performances from each region as well.

Delving quickly into the library, West African balafons, 'tango accordions' (bandoneon, surely - it certainly sounds like one!), Arabic ouds and Celtic harps, for example, gave convincing results. There are a good number of new instruments, such as larger African drums, Polynesian percussion, more Balkan voices and a gaggle of gongs. Then there are the new tuning features.

Temper, temper

One new feature of Ethno 2 is that many instruments offer authentic, non-tempered tuning or Western chromatic. For example, the ngoni, a funky six-stringed harp from Mali and neighbouring countries, is tuned to a kind of pentatonic scale, but not quite an equal-tempered one. Using Ethno, we could bring this into line using an altered, tempered version that sat better in a track that also had typical pianos and guitars.

However, when more exposed, playing with just percussion in its traditional setting, the naturally tuned ngoni could be used for greater authenticity. There's a menu of non-Western scales, containing up to 24 tones that you can map to your chosen instrument.

Ethno accepts files in a format called Scala, which is an established standard. Scala tunings are simple text files than can be dragged and dropped into the tuning menu, and you can create your own as well.

While a greater number of sample layers (velocity, round robin and so on) doesn't always translate into better sound quality, realism and usefulness, we do feel that some instruments in the collection would benefit from a more detailed, layered sample set. And the violins are unconvincing, as multisamples often are.

In our opinion, Ethno's strength is still its Loops and Phrases library. Of relevance to this is the new timestretching algorithm which, although not perfect (Spanish guitar phrases, for example, didn't pitch up that well), worked nicely on things such as voices.

Hall around the world

The convolution reverb helps bring much of Ethno's material to life and it's now easier on the CPU. Even so, patches that use it can still be quite CPU-intensive, and while presenting no problem to our MacBook Pro, some caused a dual 1.8GHz G5 running Logic Pro to stall noticeably.

Also new on the processing front is an analogue-style EQ and eight new filter types. Despite the limitations of some of the multisampled instruments, Ethno Instrument 2 won us over with the sheer variety of loops and phrases, and the rapidity with which it's possible to combine them into a rich-sounding mix.