Sound Radix Auto-Align Post 2

I’m always interested in trying out new software by Sound Radix. They offer a wide range of useful processing and utility plug‑ins, and their products demonstrate an ingenious knack for solving annoying technical problems — in my experience, they usually save time, improve the end result, or both. Auto‑Align Post 2 is one such product. Like its predecessor (but unlike most other plug‑ins) this one doesn’t operate in real time. Instead, it uses the ARA2 and AudioSuite formats, the former for most DAWs and the latter specifically for Pro Tools, to process your DAW tracks’ audio offline. It runs in Mac OS and Windows‑based hosts and, authorised using the iLok system, it can be licensed to your machine, the cloud or an iLok dongle.

Aimed primarily at the post‑production market, Auto‑Align Post was designed to automatically address the audible nasties that are often heard when one or more mics move in relation to the source and other microphones. As you ride the faders up and down in such situations, your ears can be greeted with undesirable changes in tonality, with the phase relationship between mics changing over time. A simple example is when both a lavalier and a boom mic are used to capture an actor or presenter’s voice: inevitably, the distance from the boom mic to both the source and the lav mic will vary over time, the more so if the boom operator has to follow the speaker around. Scale that up to a bigger shoot with many mics and you can imagine how many hours once had to be burned in post‑production correcting this all manually.

While the original Auto‑Align Post addressed this fairly well, Sound Radix claim that Auto‑Align Post 2 will do a better job and requires “just a few clicks”. It does deliver on that promise, and can do so pretty darned quickly too. This plug‑in should be music to the ears of anyone working on big film projects, where delays can cost a lot of money. Despite a professional price tag, Auto‑Align Post 2’s target audience should find that it covers its costs in no time.

This plug‑in should be music to the ears of anyone working on big film projects.

I tested the ARA2 version with a number of recordings in my Cubase Pro DAW software and in all cases it got on and did the job with the bare minimum of user input. Just as importantly, I could perceive no audible nasties in the results. It just works. As well as the headline time‑alignment feature, v2 also has a module to correct phase discrepancies, such as might be introduced by engaging a high‑pass filter or a low‑cut shelf to counter proximity effect. Again, this just works.

The only thing potential users might appreciate me drawing their attention to isn’t really a problem at all... The longer the recordings are, the longer it takes to process them, and there will inevitably be some post‑production scenarios in which users will be dealing with very long files indeed. I imagine the spec of the machine might have a bearing on the precise amount of time it takes, but the longest files I fed it in my Core i9 9900K‑based machine (about 20 minutes long) were processed with satisfying swiftness.

All in all, then, if you work in a commercial environment in which you have to deal with the problem of multiple moving mic signals on a routine basis, this plug‑in should be about as no‑brainer a purchase as they come.