New Music Gear Monday: Nugen Audio Aligner Phase And Polarity Plugin

Phase cancellation is the killer of good sounds, and once it’s happened it’s difficult to straighten out. Yet phase alignment is too often overlooked by recording engineers of all skill levels, especially if you’re in a hurry to get a session up and running. Worries about phase alignment and polarity might be thing of the past though, thanks to Nugen Audio’s new Aligner plugin.

One of the reasons why phase alignment is overlooked is that it takes time to correct manually, either during recording by moving microphones, or by slipping audio waveforms during mixing. Finding the correct polarity usually comes from flipping the phase switch on your preamps, or on the channel in your DAW. Aligner can do that in just a few seconds automatically.

Simple To Use

Aligner is easy to use. If an instrument was miked with multiple microphones, just add the plugin to each of the channels. Begin playing the audio from all channels with the plugin, hit the Align button, and in a few seconds all of the audio is magically phase aligned. It will also automatically change the polarity as needed.

You can also manually change both the polarity and the slip the samples of each mic if you want, but probably won’t be necessary that often.

The plugin allows you to have multiple groups, so you could have separate groups for drums, guitars, bass and whatever else you think needs aligning. As stated above, you can change which channel is the master that all the other mics can be aligned too, the Polarity of each channel, and the Samples of each channel. There’s also a master Bypass All for quick before/after comparison, as well as a Bypass for each channel as well. The plugin also names each channel as it’s named in your DAW for quick identification.

The Nugen Audio Aligner plugin is just $49 and there’s a trial period to check it out. Find out more here, or watch the video below for a detailed explanation.

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