Aligning shared audio on a timeline

Cubase
1

With the quarantine, I have been working more on recording projects with friends, sharing tracks via the cloud. We tend to end up with tracks that start and stop a various places in the timeline as we punch in/out new parts. This is a pure audio recording, no midi.

Question: are there standard approaches, when sharing tracks, for establishing a reference point (e.g., at the beginning of some reference track) and then telling the consumers of the tracks where punched in tracks should be placed in relation to the reference? We have bars+beats, seconds, timecode, etc… to work with in Cubase. The people I collaborate with have a variety of DAWs besides Cubase.

What approach do other people use?

2

You don’t have to align anything if you always render down tracks from start of song to end of song.
So all audio tracks always have the same length.

3

Thanks Peakae…Yeah… I realize this, but we often need to punch in/out on solos and various harmony parts, with multiple takes, so always starting from the beginning isn’t really feasible. Perhaps the thing to do is record a blank track for each instrument from start to finish, then punch in/out over the top of that… then export the whole track with whichever takes you want knitted together as a single audio track. Perhaps that is what you are referring to??

4

Ah… I think I just figured out what you meant by “render down”… just “Export/Audio mixdown” for selected tracks and, regardless of how many separate parts it contains, it will be rendered as a single track starting at the beginning… got it!