Audio Recording

When you are mixing in your own computer/DAW, you might be using mixing software like Adobe Audition. But sometimes, you might want others to remix your tracks and then submit those tracks to be mixed to another mixing engineer.

Of course, you do not expect the other mixing engineer to be still using Adobe audition; so this is where this problem starts. This short guide will help you solve this classic problem in mixing and lets you export any mixing session you need which is to be done by another mixing engineer.

For example, below is an example mixing session of tracks 1,2,3,4:

If you have noticed, each track actually sub-composed of two sub-tracks (left and right mono waveform). The left is panned to the left and right, panned to the right. Combining two mono waveforms result in stereo.

Track 1 started at 0 second. While Track 2, is started near the end. Track 3 is started somewhat in the middle but a rather short recording.

Track 4 is also started somewhat in the midde until the end of the song.

Supposing you are working on this using Cubase, Protools, Logic, Sonar or Adobe Audition; how you are going to export this to another mixing software for example Sony Soundforge? Or even Audacity?

Of course, one approach is to save all audio files used in the mixing session and then give it to another mixer (using a different mixing software). But the new mixing engineer does not know the arrangement details of each tracks in the multi-track space such as shown in the screenshot above.

Chances are, if those tracks are inserted to his/her multi-track software, it will not sound synchronized and the timing will be destroyed.

The Solution: TRACK TO EVERYTHING TO ZERO BEFORE EXPORTING

The solution is to track everything to zero. So for example in the track 2 above ,since it starts near the end of the song, it will be “SILENCE” from 0 second up to the moment the track 2 starts playing.

For example, track 3 is started in the middle of the song, but you can “stretch” and add silence to the track 3 waveform ALWAYS STARTING from 0 second up to the moment track 3 starts playing.

Visualizing this in a multi-track diagrams, it will look like below:

The gray colors are the silence ADDED to each wave which does not start at ZERO second. You can use your existing multitrack software to add this silence and then SAVE all affected files.

After all tracks are TRACKED to zero, you can safely save all files to a different media (DVD for example) and then give it to another mixing engineer. The engineer will simply load up all tracks with respect to zero second and then ALL tracks are still in timing and will be synchronized when gets played.

You cannot export effects done on the wave (on your current multitrack software), let the new mixing engineer decides what effects he/she needs to apply to your song. The export audio wave should entirely be a CLEAN recording only and not applied with ANY effects or whatsoever.