Trax won't line up.....

[streak]

Help! I gave my drummer AIFFS with reference trax on one side and a click on the other. He took them to his studio, dumped them into pro tools, cut his trax, then burned everything to separate SD II files. When he gave me the trax back, I flew them into my project, but they get out of sync by the end of the song. I can see by the reference click I gave him that it is off by almost an eighth note at the end.....noticeable flamming for sure. I could time scale, but I shouldn't have to... Any clues? I know he changed the sample rate to 48khz from the 44.1 I gave him. Could this be the culprit?

[musicarteca]

Help! I gave my drummer AIFFS with reference trax on one side and a click on the other. He took them to his studio, dumped them into pro tools, cut his trax, then burned everything to separate SD II files. When he gave me the trax back, I flew them into my project, but they get out of sync by the end of the song. I can see by the reference click I gave him that it is off by almost an eighth note at the end.....noticeable flamming for sure. I could time scale, but I shouldn't have to... Any clues? I know he changed the sample rate to 48khz from the 44.1 I gave him. Could this be the culprit?

He probably changed the sampling rate to 44.1, and afterwards imported your tracks. What you can do, if you do not have other audio tracks recorded, is delete the drums that you have imported and your reference audio click track. Change the sampling rate to 44.1 and then import the drums again.
If you had audio tracks already recorded, you will have to change the sampling rate of your file using an external software like Soundhack.
Whatever you, do not time scale your tracks.

[streak]

Thanks, I will look for Soundhack....

[musicarteca]

Wait a second, this should work: delete the imported drum tracks, manually change the file to 44.1 in the control pannel, then select all the soundbites from the sounbites window and convert de sampling rate to 44.1. Now import.

[streak]

Actually, My drummer had reconverted everything back to 44.1 before he gave it back to me. So the tracks started out at 44.1 went to 48k and then got reconverted to 44.1 for re import. I'm wondering if the problem came on that original conversion to 48k. I also found out that the project went to RADAR and then on to Pro Tools before it came back..... But thanks for the effort. I may try converting everything in my Project to 48k to see what happens...When I tried a quick time scale on the reference click, the weird thing is that DP thinks that the tempo of the imported track is twice the actual tempo and actually halved the soundbite!

[Tim]

Have you tried getting his original 48k drum files (or one) to see if converting them to 44 on import to your daw yields the same problem? If it does, I guess that would point to the first conversion of your files as a likely culprit.

Did he use PT's "Tweak Head" conversion setting?

[rockitcity]

I've been thinking about this thread since early this morning. As more details have emerged, one thing sticks out-lack of communication! Why has all this conversion been done in the first place? DP to Radar to Pro Tools back to DP, all at different sample rates? What a mess.

What's done is done, though. Reading the original post, if the beat is only out by an eighth note by the end of the song, it's probably not the result of a 44.1/48k sample rate problem. This seems more like 44.1/44.056 pull-down problem. Were any of these systems clocked to video reference running at pull-down speed? Which way is the beat off from the original, short or long? This difference could just be the result of all the different systems running on internal clock (although they should be more accurate than that).

Don't really have an automatic solution, but if you have the click track that was sent to the drummer from his returned session, you might have an easy time just editing the drums to match your original click. Convert your click to an audio track and line his clicks up with yours. And next time keep it all at the same sample rate.

One more thought...what if you converted his SDII's to an audio CD and imported that analog into your session? You might get rid of all the sample rate conversion anomolies that way. Then again, you might just add a few more...

Good luck.

Bob

[streak]

The reason the tracks got converted is that the studio owner is not fond of anyone changing his settings. Hence my drummer, who is only a part time engineer at the place and was lucky to be able to get some free time in there was loath to upset said owner. The guy is really touchy about his stuff. Hey, who ain't? But we have actually done this process a few times before without incident, but the songs were not quite this long....(5 min. +). Had I known about this 48k thing I could have started my project at that rate, but I always figure keep it at 44.1 cause that's where it's gonna end up anyway...Thanks for all the suggestions. I will find out about the studio's master clock, that's a very interesting premise. And I had also thought about grabbing the original 48k tracks and doing my own conversion inside of this project. otherwise known as plan B. Regarding the tweak head setting, I don't know what that is but I'm gonna check into it..I think it got converted in RADAR. The time scale weirdness is really confusing though. By the way, does anyone know how to time scale a group of tracks all at once in DP 4.6? I've only been able to do one track at a time. I appreciate you all taking the time to respond.

[David Polich]

Here's what happened -

Regardless of file audio format, if you did not export a Standard MIDI file with the tempo information, and that file was not imported into Pro Tools and the audio files dragged into it, at bar 1 beat 1, then the audio was not recorded locked to the exact same tempo you set in DP. I would absolutely expect the audio to be out of sync, there's no way it wouldn't be - EVEN if the Pro Tools project was set to the same tempo.

Here's how you do it in the future -

Export any reference audio tracks from your DP project, from bar 1 beat 1 to the very end of the tune, to a folder on your hard drive.

Export the DP project as a Standard MIDI file type 1. Before you do this, you have to highlight the conductor track from bar 1 beat 1 to the very end of the tune, and also highlight any MIDI tracks you may want to include.

Put the Standard MIDI file and the audio files you exported into the same folder and burn it to CD-ROM or DVD-ROM.

At the other end -

The Pro Tools guy should first import the Standard MIDI file into a new Pro Tools project.

Then he should drag the audio files you sent directly into Pro Tools, to bar 1 beat 1 of the song.

Record the Pro Tools audio tracks. When done, export THOSE tracks back out, from bar 1 beat 1 to wherever they end. Burn them to disc and send it back to you (if you're doing further work on the tune in DP).

I do this all the time and it always works. I never use OMF file exchange, it has NEVER worked for me. This way is foolproof, at least in my experience.

[Tim]

I thought the drummer played to the click provided with the ref track, in which case the lack of a tempo map should not matter.

If the drummer was playing to the ref click with the clock pulled up or down, the tracks should still match up when played at normal speed (the pitch of the drums would change a bit though), unless something was transfered d/a-a/d with only one machine's clock pulled up/dwn.


Try time sacaling by .1% to see if a pull up/dwn was the culprit.
BTW.....Region/Scale Time, is the only way to do multiple tracks at once.