As I mentioned previously, I started having issues with tracks not lining up properly when I received them from other folks.  This morning, I was listening to the vocal mix with James before work, and he noticed that my status bar in Adobe Audition showed “16-bit mixing.”  He said that the default is 32-bit for “premixing” and that may be the problem – everyone else is rendering their tracks in 32-bit, and mine are 16.  Apparently, he’s had issues with this in the past, and he’s had to take some rather drastic steps to fix it (ie, reinstall his operating system).  I vaguely remember changing some settings – particularly to specify that I wanted to record in mono by default.  Sure enough, the option for premixing was set to 16 bit.  I changed it, restarted Audition, created a new session, imported all the audio – including the original guitar tracks that hadn’t lined up previously, and everything was exactly the same – wrong.  I’ve already edited the guitar tracks so they line up, so that’s no biggie.

I’m going to re-render my reference mixes for Grant though, since he’s only finished one song.  If he’s done another in the meantime, I know what I need to do to edit the file to get them to fit – it’s just sticking an extra tenth of a second (give or take a millisecond) at the beginning of  the file.  I delete that much, and it lines up fine.

The rough part is lining up the many, many vocal tracks for this first song.  James is really good at harmonizing, and I’ve told him I want him to go crazy with it.  He has, and it’s great.

Hopefully, this won’t be an issue again.