matching live-recorded music (with poor quality) with better quality music

[bernhardthilo]

Hey there,

I'm working on a recording where the speaker has a fairly good microphone and on certain key-parts of his speech uses music (from background speakers) for his message.
The problem ist, that the music is very muffled, and loses most of it's quality.

I do have the .wav files of the music he uses. And no I'm trying to exactly match those (in the multitrack view) to the recorded music.
I can get them to start roughly at the same time... But of course I can't match them exactly. Which is annoying, cause you can hear the music being out of tune, especially with drums etc.

Is there a feature to exactly match to identical music clips to one another?

I hope I explained that well enough, so that you guys can get what I mean

Thanks already,

Bernhard

[ryclark · Accepted solution]

No, it is virtually impossible to match audio from different recorded versions of the same music as you have found. Is the speaker actually speaking over the music or does he stop when he plays it? The only way you can manage this is to fade out the live recording on one track of the Multitrack and fade in the clean copy of the music instead. This will only work, of course, as long as he isn't speaking on top of the music.

[bernhardthilo]

Hey Ryclark,

Thanks for answering,
It actually is exactly the same music (not different recorded versions) but the same recording we played in live (while he's speaking over it) and the exact same recording I want to lay over it again.

Which should be possible, since the recording is exactly the same one (just the one is a bit quiet und muffled), but it's difficult for me to match the song (eg. where they start) only with my hearing down to those 40 something thousand soundpoints. So that's the thing I'm looking for.

[Bob_Howes]

The trouble is, they're NOT identical.  The version that you hear through the speaker's mic is missing lots of the information that existed in the original live track.  It probably also suffers from room noise and echo.  Your other problem will be that any processing you apply will affect the speaker as well as the music.

There's nothing you can really do this time but, if you hit a situation like this again, your best bet is to use a mix of a directional mic and speaker positions that reduce the amount of sound getting to the mic the speaker is using.

[bernhardthilo]

Thanks to you both for trying to help me - But I'm still not accepting a no here!

In short, is there really no way adobe can eg. find out the rythm of a song down to those 0.00005 seconds.

So that I can at least try how it sounds? - Because it does sound pretty good so far, I just can't get them to lay exactly above each other yet.

And if it really doesn't work it would still be nice to know the process for finding out the exact rhythm, eg when I repeat music in the multitrack and do a crossfade but into the middle of the song and I have to match them.

[Richard M Knight]

You don't need it to get that close, 20ms is near enough. If you make the good version early it will help hide the difference.

[bernhardthilo]

thanks Richard, so 0.02 seconds on the timeline
That actually helps... I'm not completely happy with it. Especially the songs with drums sound too 'fast', because I can't match it close enough just by hearing it. But it definitely sounds better already

[ryclark]

Yes it can really be down to experience and being able to identify the different elements of the audio waveform. If you zoom in on both the Time and height axis of the tracks it should be easier to see and match the audio peaks.

A tool that you might try is Automatic Speech Alignment from the Clip menu. As it says it is really intended for matching speech. But it might be worth trying to see if it will tighten up you efforts so far.

[Richard M Knight]

Remember if the microphone that is picking up the music from the PA is moving every foot it moves is about a 1ms change in delay. The speaker moving up and down a stage might well affect the sync.

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

bernhardthilo  wrote

Thanks to you both for trying to help me - But I'm still not accepting a no here!

There's a good chance that the real problem here hasn't been mentioned yet. If whatever was playing this into your live performance wasn't sync-locked to the recording you made, then they will drift anyway.* So even if you get the starts aligned, then it's going to drift, and you may well find that you have to re-sync it in different places several times to get a smooth-ish flow to the whole thing. You may think that this won't join up too well, but if you are careful with the cross-fades between each re-syncing, it would probably sound as good as you can get it.

*The way around this, for future reference, is to put the track you're trying to sync to onto the multitrack first, and play that track to the performer, not something from a standalone device. That way everything remains perfectly in sync for the re-mixed version.

[ryclark]

And/or take a direct feed from the playback device and record it on another of couple of tracks on the recorder as well as the mic output. If you are just recording mono then you can easily just record the mic onto one track of a stereo recorder and the direct music feed onto the other.

[bernhardthilo]

Hey SteveG,

Now you kind of lost me, I'm still new to audition and I'm not an English native speaker.

SteveG(AudioMasters)  wrote

If whatever was playing this into your live performance wasn't sync-locked to the recording you made, then they will drift anyway.*

put the track you're trying to sync to onto the multitrack first, and play that track to the performer, not something from a standalone device.

Especially the last part I really don't understand.

So should I use audition in the multitrack view to play the track while he's talking into the mic because otherwise, they will drift apart?

So even if you get the starts aligned, then it's going to drift, and you may well find that you have to re-sync it in different places several times to get a smooth-ish flow to the whole thing. You may think that this won't join up too well, but if you are careful with the cross-fades between each re-syncing, it would probably sound as good as you can get it.

And I'm not familiar with "re-syncing" yet. I'll have to look for that.

But so far the tracks sound pretty good, except the last one (of four) where I can't get it to match properly