Align Pro

One Millisecond Is All It Takes

At 48 kHz, one millisecond is 48 samples. A one millisecond offset between two mics cancels the frequencies around 500 Hz and its odd harmonics. That is why a kick sounds hollow, a miked guitar cab blended with a DI loses its body, and a choir array feels thin the moment everything is summed. It happens long before anyone reaches for an EQ.

Align Pro fixes the timing and the phase between every mic at once. And because a little disagreement between mics is part of what makes a room sound like a room, it lets you choose how much to fix.

Insert, Play Ten Seconds, Align

Insert Align Pro on every mic of the source. Play about ten seconds so the analysis can find each arrival, then press Align All. Every group aligns to its own reference and the correlation figures update. With ARA2 there is nothing to play at all, because your DAW hands over the audio and the analysis happens without a capture pass.

Every Mic Against Every Other Mic

Align Pro does not just compare each track with its own reference. It scores the whole array at once in a correlation matrix, which is where you find the pair that is fighting, like the overhead and the room that never agreed, or the snare bottom pulling against the kick.

A Dial for How Far to Take It

Alignment at full strength can flatten a kit. The Amount dial scales how much of the correction is applied, live, from none of it to all of it. You hear the correlation climb and stop at the point where the problem is fixed but it still sounds like a drum kit.

Compared With Auto-Align 2

Sound Radix Auto-Align 2 is the established tool in this category and the fair comparison. The core alignment is the same. These are the places they differ.