Yes , I agree with bitflipper on having the plain WAV's , also on his point of having everything start at zero
regardless of how much silence there might be before there is an actual musical part.
to augment what is being said here , may I suggest that you also have your collaborator send you a reference mix of what his project sounds like exported from his DAW .
this is very important and the mix itself is not the main thing here ....
the exported mix is for your reference musically and visually .
you drop the reference track / mix into your SONAR project , this will help you greatly with keeping your time line in order ...
you can see where all the major activity is for the various sections of the song
the other added benefit is for all the tracks that have a lot of silences in places ....
with those you will now have a reference point to do your slip edits , and you can also correct any drift that might occurred .
personally I like to do "apply trimming " to those edits . it helps with the disc streaming and there is a lot less CPU resources being wasted that way .
to get everything lined up sonically I like to play the reference mix while soloing each track individually
I can't stress how often I've seen a difference between the reference track and the individual WAV files
it is easy to see where the phrase starts and how it ends ...if you have a phrase w a long sustained note that decreases in amplitude and then another phrase starts ...you will have a nice visual cue to line things up
I bring all of this up because it is very easy to correct this and it can be one of two things ....
either the reference track is not dead on in time , or the exported files are not dead on in time ....
to find out if the reference track is in time you solo it with the metronome playing along ....
do the same with the exported tracks to see if there is a difference .....
now here's where I'm different than most people ....if the stems all line up and play in time I go with that
my reasons are many ...some folks just cant seem to play in time , and sometimes unintentional edits mysteriously happen on these reference tracks .....LOL
the cool thing is
usually when people export individual tracks at a consistent uniform sample rate they will line up correctly in another DAW whether you know the tempo or not.
also it is a lot easier to move one track , the reference track ...( so everything lines up )
if you are doing your job right the reference track will be muted most of the time any way ....
it's only there for reference ...
one thing I love is when I A/ B the parts I have added in the main project to the reference track
I know I'm getting real close when the main project starts sounding really good and the reference track sounds like lukewarm left over Dog CR*P lol.....
trust me when that happens you don't even have to tell people you use SONAR ....They Know ...
all the best ,
Kenny
post edited by kennywtelejazz - 2014/03/11 01:22:27