This is the one tool that I thought that I'd need the least.  Then, I recorded some vocal tracks last weekend where the harmony was just a bit out of line with the lead vox.  Since the notes were on pitch, I thought I'd give this tool a spin.  Lo and behold, it worked like a charm saving me several minutes of rerecording the harmony.  It's quite simple to use and just took a couple of seconds to render.  Results may vary with longer tracks, but if the clips are relatively short, it's a winner.  It's a tool that I hope not to need very often, but if I do, I'm glad that it's there.

Hi folks,
I just gave this a quick trial run, three tracks, each of them with the words "one" and "two" every two beats. Track 1 was my guide, track two was a unison double, track three was sung a fifth up from track one. It seemed to work pretty well regardless of pitch differences. It seems like it's an automated method of transient alignment. That is, is seems to replicate what would happen if you enabled Audiosnap on all the clips and then aligned the transients with whatever you select as the guide.
 
I also tried it with three syllable words ("location, location, location") and it seemed to line up internal transients as well.
 
I can see why Cake suggests using short clips. It seems that with longer clips it begins to get tough to line up all the transients. That is, with longer clips you start to get one word or section lined up, but others out of alignment. My initial impression suggests it's probably better to chop things up into short clips and align separately.
 
Hope that helps
Dean

Seems to me it's the type of tool an anal freak like me would make use of. Currently I do a ton of different takes and match then for doubling purposes. The variables I look at are a) Tone, b) attack, c) performance/tightness.
 
So it turns into an equation and something like this has the potential to remove the c) part out of the equation.
 
For example I have a track that I consider to be my "final" but I want to beef it up/pan it. I have various takes that are tight with it but I don't like the tone or attack. I have other takes where the tone/attack is good but it's slightly off with my final. Having a convenient tool to nudge those little discrepancies into place without goign through the epic process of Audiosnapping the bugger is cool.
 
I would really like to see it honed to guitar stuff but considering I'm a worst vocalist than a guitar player this would still be very helpful (probably more so once I actual start recording vocals again).
 
And yes... I'm guessing you really want to split things out to get the most effectiveness from it. This would be one of those things you'd use for gang vocals and harmonies to tighten the articulations in modern style productions. For some reason Green Day comes to mind.

Anderton
In the "helpful abuse" category, you can also set it "wrong" and spread vocals further apart to differentiate them more if they're too tight.
 

Out of curiosity, I tried to double up a vocal track by copying it and de-tighening one compared to the other with VocalSync. It doesn't work, so I did it the old-fashioned way.
 
Just in case anyone else was wondering. :)

I think Vocalsync is brilliant!  It is one of the best new features in Sonar.  At first I was disappointed because I was getting noticeable artifacts.  However, once I made an adjustment mention in another thread, all is well.  It makes syncing up double track vocals a cinch.

I think VocalSync is a little underrated in terms of how valuable it really is for producers and engineers. They are similar products on the market that go for upwards of $500 that accomplish very similar results. Basically, this is a huge time saving tool for producers who need to absolutely align multiple vocal takes across a performance. Before this kind of technology, they would have to meticulously move and slide vocals to get them to align and sound tight. This is an absolute must for most commercially released music. It works great on vocal leads, harmonies and backing vocals. Now what makes VocalSync even cooler is the integration inside of SONAR. Third party versions of this technology often show up as plugins and require more processing to achieve results. With VocalSync, this technology is integrated right inside of SONAR allowing you to preview the waveforms visually and adjust to taste, and then quickly render the results. 
 
So why is this such a holy grail for producer? Well, as mentioned before, doing this manually is painstakingly difficult and time consuming. Sure you can do it yourself but really why would you want when this kind of technology can streamline this process and achieve the same or better results in most cases -and in less time. When we talked to producers, we got a lot of feedback about how cool it would be to integrate this inside of SONAR, so that's what we did. This is a professional grade tool that almost anyone, regardless of skill level, can master in no time. We think that's pretty cool. 
 
The other very important use for this tool is in the post production world for audio dialog replacement. Let's say you record video or film using a scratch track or you have a noisy environment. You can now have the actor come in and re-record his/her lines in a controlled environment and then easily match the new and improved vocal take with the bad audio track. Again, this is a huge time saver. 
 
So basically, we see this as a very powerful tool, aimed at pros. And that's why it's included in SONAR Platinum. 
 
My 2 cents. 

@Andrew... I don't even own it (yet) but yeah, that was exactly the impression I got from it. It's not like Sonar couldn't do this stuff already via audiosnap or other time/transient stretching stuff or I guess old school slice/nudge/fade... YIKES) but this is a million times faster.
 
I hadn't really considered overdub work for film but that makes sense. Somewaht of topic but it's funny... due to the crummy soundproofing here when I watch tv shows and stuff I use headphones. It is really funny watching some old stuff and hearing those dub ins. You don't notice it coming out of crummy TV speakers or even on a stereo system but with headphones on the serious drop of room noise/ambience and general tone becomes really noticeable. Makes me giggle a little.
 
Obviously newer shows don't suffer from that as much but look at the tools we have now.
 
I do hope you guys work on some presets for V-Align so I can use it on other instruments but I'm no programmer. Maybe that's just not possible.
 
Cheers.

dantarbill
I guess I'd need to try this out...but the examples all assume you want to tighten up a doubled (unison) line.  Would this work on tightening up timing on vocal harmonies (i.e. dissimilar voices singing dissimilar notes, but at what's supposed to be the same time)?

Absolutely that's one of the use cases. It doesn't care about the pitch of the notes but the "onsets" of all the syllables in the parts. It will work perfectly with harmony parts. Now if you go crazy and the harmonies have completely different syllables and rhythms it may get confused trying to match up the phrases.
In such cases you can simply use VocalSync on selected portions of the audio you wish to align. It is designed to be a simple and fast way to do alignment for multi-track vocals in a DAW rather than be a end all solution to alignment.
 

GregGraves
Me too, Quadcore.  Suppose you had the following phrase you were trying to double:
 
"Spitting Dan, he was the spittenest man
He'd spit on the floor, he'd spit on a whore, he'd spit on the unsuspecting"
 
Take the word "spitting".  That has a start ("sp") and an end ("ing") but it also has an internal transiet "itt".  In practice, does VocalSync only sync up the beginning "sp" and the end "ing", or does it also try to line up internal transients?  I.e., does it REALLY work, or does it only get you part of the way there.

Yes it would line up the internal transients (onsets) assuming that the guide track had the same onsets. The brain of the VocalSync algorithm consists of onset detection and matching and then finally stretching to align the matched sections. Its way more complex than aligning based on the start of the phrase :)
It would literally take you hours to do the work that the algorithm does in seconds on a moderately long section of audio.
 

This is a fantastic tool imho.  I was blown away with mix scenes but the more I try out this new piece of the package the more I like it, and am very impressed with everything that's going on under the hood.