I am trying to do instrumental masters usings a WaveLab Pro 12 (v.12.0.51 on Windows 10) audio montage I’d previously used for mastering the full mixes. I initially tried this doing one by one audio file replacements for each clip as I wasn’t aware of the bulk audio file replacement feature. However, I was noticing alignment issues with the first file in my project there, and that seems to be consistent with the symptom here, so I’ll just describe it here.
In particular, I’d noticed (in both cases, but the screen shots I’ll show are from the bulk audio file replacement) that the start and ends of the first clip/track were different between the full mix:
However, the reality is that the two files are the exact same size (and bit-depth/sample rate). Here are the stats from the original mix, directly from the WaveLab project’s audio directory:
and here are the same stats for the instrumental mix file (from the directory with the instrumental mixes that was the source of the bulk file import, though the stats are the same in the WaveLab project’s audio directory after the bulk import):
I should probably note that both files, which are unmastered mixes, have silent areas at the heads and tails of the audio files to allow heads/tails editing and fade-ins/fade-outs, and I did do such edits in the WaveLab audio montage for the full mix.
It may also be helpful to note that I created the montage for the instrumental mix using the audio montage’s File/New/Audio Montage/From Current File/Exact Duplicate (Using the Same Audio Files) option.
Any clue what could be going on and how to get past this?
Open the files in the audio editor that do not match and verify the number of samples. That is, do not rely only on what you see from the dialog you show in your pictures.
This happens to me randomly. The file sizes are sample accurate sizes.
I have found that toggling the box File>Preferences>Audio Montages>All Audio Montages>When an Audio File is Replaced in Clip>Synchronize Clip Length with Audio File usually cures the issue
Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it, actually a whole bunch of times and with different settings for the shift clips to the right setting (since that was originally set in my preferences), and also with the synchronization turned on and off, but it didn’t make a difference in the high-level situation (it did make a difference in terms of the specifics of how the end of the clip overlapped with the next clip or got faded too early within the montage clip, where there should have been no change in any of that from the full mix boundaries).
I think I may have found a clue, but, at the moment, I don’t have a thought on how to work around it (it’s still fairly early here, so hopefully I’ll figure out something later). In particular, as I’d noted in my response to @PG1 :
However, this response was talking about the underlying audio files used in the project (both the original source files I’d added to the project, and the ones in WaveLab’s audio directory). What I didn’t try earlier was using Edit Source to check the same statistic. The number of samples there was 21,959,912, and I could visibly see in the wave there, that the front end of the original full mix file was truncated in that view (the ending still had the extra silence).
What I don’t know is how it got that way, but it could be that there is some sort of “user error” I made in setting up the project and doing the initial slip editing on this file, which happens to be the first track in the album, and thus the one I was trimming first in the audio montage (I should note I never used the audio editor for any of the trimming).
Ideally, there would be some way to reverse the “how it got that way” situation. However, at this point my “thinking out loud” is that maybe, I can create copies of the instrumental and karaoke WAV files, then truncate the exact number of samples difference (i.e. between the actual files and the view that shows up in Edit Source) from the front end of each of those files, then do the replacement with the truncated files instead of the originals.
FYI, this workaround worked. I’d still be interested to know how the file in Edit Source got truncated compare to the underlying audio file, but at least I have a way to proceed with the rest of this project now.
Well, there’s certainly nothing I did intentionally in this area, but it could perhaps be that there was some operation and prompt I didn’t understand at the time.
