Pro Tools Tip – Don’t trust the timing accuracy of Audiosuite processing

Today I was mixing a song in Pro Tools and came across a big problem with the Pitch Shift and Time Shift Audiosuite plugins.

Here’s what happened:

I had a horn part that just didn’t sound as thick as I wanted.
I duplicated the track and processed the duplicate with Audiosuite Pitch Shift down one octave.
I played it back the notes were all way off in timing!
I tried it again with the TimeShift plugin and had similar results.
I had to manually pocket every phrase because it was just so badly off and inconsistently too. In the picture above that one note is 79ms later than the original.

Obviously this is annoying! It might have gone unnoticed had I been just replacing the part and not layering it.

PAY ATTENTION! DON’T TRUST AVID TO GET IT RIGHT!!!!

Of course if you think this is operator error let me know what I did wrong.