Synchronizing Tracks
One of the great things about Kompoz is that it allows us to work
remotely with other musicians, often a half a world away and a dozen
time zones apart. It means that anyone, anywhere can be your virtual band mate.
That's pretty awesome! But when your drummer lives in Kalamazoo and your guitar
player is in Liverpool, chances are pretty good that they'll be using
different recording software, and probably different audio encoders and compression algorithms.
This presents a problem that sometimes results in the individual tracks of a song
getting out of sync -- out of alignment -- with each other.
This can happen because audio encoders will pad or even eliminate silence at the beginning of
a track for the sake of compression optimization.
Let's walk through an example. Let's say you've recorded a killer drum line. You save it as an MP3 and upload it to Kompoz. When you listen to the file, there's maybe a second of silence, then your drums kick in -- sounds great. Your guitar player imports that track into his Pro Tools, arms a new track for recording, and starts laying down a great rhythm in-step with your drumming. It all sounds perfect on his workstation and he exports just his guitar track to an MP3, then uploads that to Kompoz. But what he doesn't realize is that his MP3 encoder added an extra few milliseconds of silence at the beginning of his MP3 in order to get a good byte-alignment and better overall file compression. The problem now is that when you import his new guitar track into your workstation, the two tracks will not start at exactly the same time, and you'll get noticeable track drift as the song progresses.
That's just one example of how tracks recorded by different people using different tools can get out of sync.
A good engineer with lots of time can usually spot that and correct the problem. But when you're dealing with multiple tracks from multiple people, why bother?
What's the Solution?
Fortunately there's a rather easy solution to this problem. The trick is to add a sync tone at the beginning of each recorded track. And the key is that everyone has to agree to use the same exact sync tone. The sync tone acts as a sort of audible marker -- a tic -- that can be used to both visually and audibly line up each track and lock them together.
Each time a new track is recorded, the sync tone must be routed to the new track so that it becomes part of that track. When tracks with these markers are imported into your workstation, they can be aligned with great precision.
Do I Have to Use Sync Tracks?
Are sync tracks always required? If you're just adding a new track onto an existing mix and exporting a whole new mix with your work layered on, then there's no need to work with a sync track. Or if you're just a casual musician working on your own, or you're more interested in just sharing ideas, then again, using a sync track may be unnecessary. However, if you plan to participate in a project with the intention of working with others to produce separate tracks that can be used in a final mixdown, then this tutorial is for you. Invest the twenty minutes required to watch the tutorial video and save yourself hours of re-work later. Your virtual band mates will definitely thank you!
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Watch The Tutoral
Tutorial on using Sync Tracks at kompoz.com
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Download Sync Track
Download the official Kompoz "Sync Track" WAV file. Special thanks to dogbizkits
for providing this to our Kompoz community.
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Talk About It
Ask a question or post a comment about this topic. Share your thoughts with other members.
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Watch the tutorial on Blip.tv
Go to Blip.tv to watch our tutorial on using Sync Tracks. View other
Kompoz tutorials on Blip.tv.
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