Simplest software for playing & recording simultaneous

[BillPeet]

Hey all,

I'm working on a large project that requires recording video/audio of ~1000 separate individuals singing along with a guidance track, that will be stitched together in a professional production.

I'm investigating the easiest way of keeping all separate tracks aligned without the manual work of aligning each track one-by-one. Ideally, we would send each individual performer a simple/free tool that could both play the guidance track (audio & video), while simultaneously recording their video and audio. That way the recording would be automatically aligned with the guidance track, since they are both started by the same software.

I'm sure this could be done with some of the large industry-standard commercial software packages, but unfortunately that's not going to be an option on such a large scale - ideally this could be achieved with free software, even better if it was a very compact piece of software to avoid having to install a large software package on every individual's machine.

Does anybody know of any free/open-source software that could achieve this?

[johnmeyer]

The 1,000 tracks is a daunting number. Even my professional NLE Vegas, which started out as a sound editor, might not be able to handle that many tracks. I'd be amazed if any free software (e.g., Audacity) could do that.

However, whatever the number of tracks, the key will be to have some sort of control track with each singer's voice. The obvious thing is to include the guidance track with each singer. In other words, record that along with each singer's voice as they sing to it. You can then use that track to align all the voices, and do so perfectly.

Look into a piece of software called PluralEyes that can automatically align multiple tracks based on the sound content. I use it all the time, and it works perfectly.

Once again, the real challenge will be to find something that can handle that many voices. You may have to do it fifty voices at a time, and then stitch those groups together into the final master.

[Cornucopia]

Countdown, Two-pop, Clapper mark (at start & end), click track, windowed timecode.

Have each listen to the ref track (incl main vox and/or rhythm section in one ear & click track in the other) using headphones/earbuds. Have each do an "overdub" in audacity, with playback of the ref in one track while recording live in another. They can do multiple takes, but it should always be that same length. That will make it much easier to line up, just slipping micro-units earlier or later.

If you cannot afford pluraleyes, it is quite possible to do manually, but either way, you'll have to segment it either by time or by layer in order to accomplish such a large task.


Scott

[Cornucopia]

If you are doing video for each, instead of audio only, you'll need a decent pro or semi-pro nle, and you will need to decide whether the talent also need to see a video or whether they can make do with a ref audio-only track. And if they are overdubbing and adding video, they will also need their own nle.

Scott