SmartAlign
SmartAlign is a new feature included in VocAlign Project 5 that intelligently resolves the issue of aligning audio in a Dub that doesn't start or end at the same points on the timeline as the Guide. It uses the position of the Dub to find the matching audio in the Guide, rather than the other way round, and then aligns the Dub to the Guide as usual.
If you're used to the previous versions of VocAlign, you'll be all too familiar with the process of cutting out sections of long Guides in order to match them up to the start and end points of the Dub. With SmartAlign, you no longer need to do that.
Be aware, however, that SmartAlign expects each section of Dub-matching audio in Guide to start no more than 0.25s before the start of the matching audio in the Dub. In all the following examples, we'll show you to align the Dub to the Guide first with and then without SmartAlign.
Although SmartAlign might appear to be a function you would never want to turn off, because it's so new, we wanted to retain the option to let you use the original algorithm in case of unexpected results. And if your Guide and Dub audio regions start and stop at roughly the same points in your DAW anyway, SmartAlign may sometimes not be required.
SmartAlign is ON in most of the presets, and we recommend leaving it that way unless you run into any issues.