Manual contents

Analyzing

Analysis works by listening to a shared window of playback — the same passage, taken from every connected instance at the same host timeline position — and then measuring it.

Starting Analyze while stopped

  1. Place the playhead shortly before useful material.
  2. Click ANALYZE.
  3. PhaseLock displays WAITING FOR PLAY.
  4. Start the DAW transport.

Every connected instance arms together and begins analyzing from the same position. Click Analyze a second time while waiting if you want to disarm it.

Starting Analyze during playback

You can start playback first and click ANALYZE while the transport is moving. PhaseLock schedules a shared start point for all connected instances and begins analyzing without requiring you to stop.

Live mode

Live-sound rigs such as Waves SuperRack have no transport and no playhead: audio runs continuously, so the normal Analyze path, which waits for the host to play, never starts. Turn on Live in the header for these hosts. PhaseLock then analyzes the running audio directly, with no transport.

Live mode changes what alignment costs. The sound has already left each microphone, so PhaseLock cannot pull a late mic earlier; it aligns by delaying the earlier microphones to meet the latest one. That delay is real, and PhaseLock shows it as LATENCY at all times so you can decide whether to accept it. Polarity and Phase Coherence add no delay, so you can keep phase correction on at no latency cost and add Time Alignment only where the added delay is worth it. Each lane shows its own delay in milliseconds.

Live mode is a manual switch. PhaseLock never turns it on for you. A session saved in Live mode reopens in Live mode.

Analysis status

The button and status line report the current stage:

  • WAITING FOR PLAY: the instances are armed; start the DAW transport.
  • ANALYZING N%: PhaseLock is listening to every active instance. The percentage fills to 100% by about eight seconds — the recommended amount — and then holds at 100% while you keep playing.
  • ANALYZING: listening is complete and PhaseLock is calculating corrections and displays.
  • A completed status reports how many instances were aligned and the analyzed duration.

The previous graphs may remain visible and dimmed during reanalysis. An UPDATING message marks them as results from the earlier run.

How long to play

Eight seconds is a recommended target, not a limit. Press ANALYZE, play the passage, and stop the transport whenever you are satisfied — PhaseLock analyzes everything it heard, however long that was. The progress bar filling to 100% at eight seconds means the recommended amount has been reached, not that PhaseLock has stopped listening; it keeps going until you stop.

If you keep playing, analysis ends on its own at thirty seconds, the hard ceiling.

You can also stop before eight seconds. If at least one second played, PhaseLock seals what it heard and analyzes it; less than a second ends with a stopped too soon message. A short, carefully chosen passage can work for a single drum hit or other transient, but longer passages usually give more reliable frequency-dependent phase measurements.

This means the common case is simply: press ANALYZE, let the performance play, and stop when it sounds representative. There is no need to stop at eight seconds and add a second pass just to analyze more of the same continuous passage.

When to analyze again

Run Analyze again after changes that alter the signal reaching PhaseLock, including:

  • Moving PhaseLock to a different insert position
  • Changing processing before PhaseLock
  • Replacing, adding, or removing a microphone track
  • Moving an instance to a different group
  • Changing the session sample rate
  • Changing the section you want analyzed

Changing a reference or a PhaseLock control can often recalculate from the last analysis. If the required lane was not part of it, PhaseLock asks you to analyze again.

Adding more audio to a group

Add to Analysis is for a distinct passage the first analysis missed — a tom fill that only happened later, or a microphone that sat out. It is not the way to analyze more of one continuous passage; for that, simply keep playing during the first analysis. The + beside a lane’s group adds another pass of playback to that group’s existing analysis instead of starting over.

  1. Click the + on any lane in the group.
  2. PhaseLock arms that group and waits for playback, the way Analyze does.
  3. Start the transport, play the passage you want to add, and stop when done.
  4. PhaseLock appends the new pass to the group’s existing audio, re-measures the group, and locks it again. Every other group stays exactly as it was.

A group holds up to thirty seconds of analyzed audio in total, shared between the first pass and any additions — the same thirty-second ceiling a single continuous analysis reaches. A long first pass therefore leaves less room to add, and a group already at thirty seconds cannot take more without re-analyzing (PhaseLock says so instead of adding). Each addition plays until you stop, up to whatever budget remains. Add to Analysis works on a group in the current session; it is not available after you reopen a saved session, because PhaseLock does not store the analyzed audio.

Sample-rate changes

A correction belongs to the sample rate at which it was measured. When the DAW sample rate changes, PhaseLock marks the existing result as stale and stops applying it. Run Analyze again at the new sample rate.

All participating plugin instances must run at the same sample rate.