Vocalsync - just a visual aid for aligning tracks?

From Sonar's online help: "VocalSync applies varying amounts of time stretching or compression to the dub audio"
 
 
 

Also it's very important to note that the "sweet spot" on the dial will vary for different material. It is NOT a situation where turning it up tightens and turning down loosens. The sweet spot could be anywhere along the dial's continuum.
 
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.
 

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.

mudgel
It's a quick means to get two vocals that are just a little out to line up as best as possible. It's not aimed at perfection.

It's also a technology, sort of like Melodyne is a technology, and it can be "taught" to deal with more use cases if Cakewalk wants to continue developing it (which I believe they do).

Noel told me (at NAMM 2015) it is not a pitch tool. It will work best on smaller sections and at present it's best suited for doubled and harmony lines of reasonable duration. 
 
As stated by Craig, this tool will most likely be improved upon over time and will fill a gap (for me) that could end up being a lot more work if I tried to do it in Melodyne.
 
FWIW, in the past when I was faced with harmony BGVs that had a single word that was not aligned I just did a cut of the phrase, nudged it then time stretched. VocalSync could be a time saver even in this scenario. 

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

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 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. 

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.
 

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.

It looks like VocalSync will be indispensible for ADR. It was one of my reasons for upgrading, although I guess I've never actually failed to come up with enough reasons to upgrade since MSDOS.