Sometimes stopping and starting a project will make a virtual instrument temporarily out of tune or out of time. But I have one project in which Melodyne is continually out of sync.

I edited an entire vocal track and it was fine. Now when I play the track back, the Melodyne vocal is way ahead of the beat. Sometimes I can fix this by turning the Melodyne plug off and on and scrolling through the project, but sometimes I cannot get it back in sync.

Ideas?

This is a huge problem because when I bounce the track, it is out of sync. I can get it to play in sync about 1 in 10 times by stopping, restarting, turning Melodyne off and on, etc. but I never know when it will work and when it won't. Have not been able to get an in-sync bounce yet.

This is preventing completion of back-up vocals.

To be more specific about what happens, I can only get this track in sync by turning off Melodyne, playing a little of the track, then backing up to right before the vocal and turning Melodyne on. HOWEVER, bounce always starts at the top of the track and therefore makes the vocal out of sync.

This is insane and frustrating.

FYI, I did alter the ASIO buffer as Melodyne recommends, but that did not affect this issue.

Hello konradh,

I sometimes wish I had second sight, but since I don’t, could you please let me know more details?

Is this Melodyne assistant, as your profile says? Which version is this? Is it running as a standalone program via Rewire, or is this the plug-in? If it is the plug-in, which DAW and DAW version do you use? Which OS? Is Melodyne in the very first insert slot of your mixer channel? Which other plug-ins do you use in the same chain? Have you got any tempo changes in your song? Also, do the sync problems occur in any of your projects or just one particular one?

Claudio, My apologies. I composed my post and in Notepad and accidentally did not paste the entire text.

- Melodyne Assistant 2.0.1 (64-bit)
- Sonar X1-b running in 64-bit using ASIO
- I have a Cakewalk V-Studio 700 as the audio interface and console (control surface)
- 8-core PC with 12 GBs RAM. PC is rack-mounted Creation Station from Sweetwater Sound, optimized for audio.
- Running Windows 7, 64-bit
- Using Melodyne as a plug in in the FX bin of a vocal (audio) track in Sonar X1. I think this is what you mean by mixer slots.
- No other effects in the chain, except for the Sonar ProChannel EQ, although I disabled that and still have the problem.
- I have the Track set to POST so that I can hear ProChannel EQ and Compression, if I choose to use it. (Otherwise, Melodyne will bypass those effects.) As noted, however, in this project, I have no ProChannel effects turned on. Melodyne is the only effect. (Reverb is added by a send, not as an insert.)

Update: By repeated trail and error, I finally was lucky enough to get the main vocal track bounced without the delay. I still have harmony tracks to do on this project, and several other projects to complete for the album, so I would like to figure out what is going on. The Melodyne (non-bounced track) still plays out of sync. It starts early.

By the way, I updated my Sonar Preferences to set ASIO to 1,028 samples. This reduced CPU load but greatly increased latency. It had no effect on the this out-of-sync problem.

UPDATE: This is becoming a nightmare. I am trying to work on three tracks (lead + two harmonies). Sometimes they are together and sometimes not. If I edit them to get them in time together, and then play them back and they are NOT together, I don't know if Melodyne was out of sync the first time or the second time: I have no way to know if my edits are making things better or worse. This is completely unusable until this is resolved.

Hello konradh,

Thanks for the additional info. Could you please also answer these two crucial questions?

Moreover, have you possibly changed the Sonar arrangement after you had already transferred audio to Melodyne? This is also a popular mistake for sync issues.

By the way, the latest Melodyne assistant version is currently v2.1. It’s a free update and it improves Melodyne’s overall stability and performance. Please update your software and see if it already solves your problems.

The only tempo change is a ritard at the very end of the song after the vocal is finished. That has always been there.

There have been no arrangement changes to the song: the vocal was done last.

One project is giving me the most trouble, but I have had the issue on others.

I will try the update IF I can be absolutely sure i will not lose any of my Melodyne transfer files. When I had to reinstall one time, I lost all my work, so I am somewhat afraid to make a change in the middle of an album. If this absolutely will not break anything, lose any transfer files (or mess up the pointers to the locations), or cause any issues with Sonar finding the VST, then upgrade would be something to try.

Thanks.

Hello konradh,

So first you should make sure Melodyne knows about the tempo change(s). See here.

Next I would give the update a try, but I agree with you that you should never update anything in the middle of production. Perhaps you could test it on a second computer?

Please let us know, if this solves your issue.

Hi, Claudio. Not sure what you mean by syaing I shouold make sure Melodyne knows about tempo changes, but there are no tempo changes in effect in this case.

Didn’t you say there is a ritard in this song? That’s a tempo change. Please follow the link above, try teaching Melodyne the tempo change, and see if it makes a difference.

There is a slight ritard but that is long after all the voices have stopped singing. Not sure how that would affect anything but i will look at the link. Thanks.