Some audio situations don't give you a clean, trimmed take for every scene. A backup recorder running continuously. A mic taped inside a car door with its own recorder because you couldn't run a cable to the cart. A safety rig in a location you couldn't physically access once shooting started. In all of these cases, the recorder runs on its own schedule. It doesn't know when the director calls action or cut. You get long, unstructured files that don't align with your primary take structure.
And sometimes the problem is the opposite: your primary recorder missed something. A bug, a missed record button, a take that started before the main rig was rolling. You have audio from a secondary source, but no primary file to match against.
Wave Copilot's Conform tab handles all of these situations using timecode. You'll find it in Split/Combine, alongside the split and combine tools, and it offers three modes: Match Reference, Custom TC Range, and Track Replace.
Why timecode is the right tool for this
Every professional WAV file carries a timecode stamp in its bEXT metadata, the exact timecode at which that recording started. This value is written by the recorder at the moment of capture and doesn't change. It's precise to the sample.
This means two files recorded at the same time, your primary and your backup, both know exactly when they started, even if one is a 3-minute take and the other is a 45-minute continuous recording. Timecode is the common reference that lets you align them without waveform matching, without a DAW, and without listening through files manually.
Match Reference
The most common use case: you have a set of primary files and a set of secondary recordings. You want one trimmed secondary file for each primary file, covering exactly the same timecode range.
This applies to backup recorders, but also to any recorder that ran independently of the main rig. A common example is car recording: you tape a mic inside the door panel or the dashboard, connect it to a small recorder hidden somewhere, and let it roll for the entire driving sequence, because you have no way to reach it once the camera car is moving. That recorder might run for two hours. Your primary recorder has 15 trimmed takes from the same sequence. Match Reference extracts those 15 windows from the car recorder's continuous file, one per take, trimmed to the exact TC range of each primary clip.
The two sets go in two different places, and the distinction matters. Your primary takes are the session: load them into Wave Copilot's main file list, the way you would to edit their metadata or report on them. The continuous recordings go into the Conform tab's own Backup Recordings list, added by file or by folder, or dragged in. Wave Copilot reads the timecode from every file in both sets, maps the primary TC ranges against the backups, and fills in a match table, one row per output file. Review it, choose an output format, pick a destination, and click Trim & Export. Every output is trimmed to the sample.
Outputs are named 'Scene_Take_BackupFileName.wav' by default, so '12A_T1_ZOOM0001.wav' tells you the take and the source at a glance. If your production names files differently, the Output Filename section builds your own scheme out of the take's own attributes, and each conform mode remembers its own.
This works whether your secondary source is one long continuous file, several long files, or a different take structure entirely. As long as the timecode was running correctly in both recorders, Wave Copilot finds the right audio.
Two things worth knowing about this mode. You don't actually need the primary WAV files: if you have the day's sound report as a CSV but the takes themselves are on a drive somewhere else, load the CSV as the reference source instead and conform against its take list. And if you'd rather have one file per take than a folder of trimmed mono files, tick Poly WAV Output and every backup channel that overlaps a take becomes a channel of a single poly WAV for that take, with silence filling any gap and split recordings stitched back together by track name. Merge with reference folds the take's own channels into that poly as well.
Custom TC Range
Sometimes there's no primary file to match against. The primary recorder wasn't rolling, a missed record button, a software bug, a take that started before the main rig caught up. In that situation, the secondary recording is the only source you have, and you need to extract a specific window of time from it: the TC range that the take would have covered if the primary had been running.
Custom TC Range is built for exactly this. Start TC and End TC are prefilled with the full span of the backups you've loaded, so the default window covers everything; narrow it by typing your own, based on your script supervisor's notes, your slate timecode, or whatever reference you have. The frame rate and drop-frame setting are read from the first backup file, so you're not setting those by hand. Type a range of your own and it stays put as you add and remove files, and a Full range button brings back the full span whenever you want it.
Wave Copilot goes through the loaded backups, finds any audio that overlaps the window, and trims it to the range. Files outside the range are skipped. Files that partially overlap are trimmed to the overlap region only. Poly WAV Output works here too, assembling every overlapping backup into one multi-channel file for the window.
It works for more than recovery: extracting a specific interview block from a long continuous recording, pulling a scene's worth of audio from a multi-hour safety rig file, or QCing a specific sequence. Any time you know the timecode range you need and don't have a primary file to match against, this is the mode to use.
Track Replace
The first two modes are about trimming or extracting audio. Track Replace is different: it fixes a specific channel inside an existing primary polyphonic file.
The situation it's designed for: you recorded on a multi-channel rig all day and one channel is unusable. A wireless receiver that was picking up interference. A lav that rubbed on every take. A dropout that repeated throughout the shoot. Your primary poly WAV files are otherwise perfect, right length, right timecode, right take structure, but channel 4 (or whichever channel the problem hit) is garbage. And your backup recorder captured the same source cleanly on one of its channels.
Track Replace reads both files, aligns them by timecode, extracts the clean audio from the specified backup channel, and writes it into the specified channel of the primary file. The output is a new poly WAV that's identical to the original except the replaced channel. All other channels come from the primary untouched, and the iXML track names are updated to describe the file that actually came out.
Each take appears as its own panel with every output channel listed and a source dropdown beside it. You rarely have to fill those in from scratch: Wave Copilot compares the track names in the primary file against the track names in each backup and pre-selects the matches, so the job is usually review rather than configuration. A channel can also be dropped from the output entirely, which strips a ruined mix pair in the same pass instead of needing a Split Poly run afterwards. Only polyphonic primaries appear here; mono files and multi-mono groups are excluded.
This is a non-destructive operation. The original primary file isn't modified. Each output takes its own reference file's sample rate, bit depth and exact duration, and goes to a folder you specify.
The alternative is pulling every affected primary file into a DAW, routing the backup channel to the right track, trimming to match, and exporting. For a full shooting day with dozens of takes, that's an hour or more of mechanical work. Track Replace does it in batch.
Normalize audio to -1 dBFS
All three modes include a Normalize audio to -1 dBFS checkbox. When enabled, each backup channel is measured before extraction and the gain needed to bring its peak to -1 dBFS is applied to the output. Each mode remembers its own setting.
The main use case is 32-bit float recordings. Recorders that capture in 32-bit float, Zoom F-series, Sound Devices MixPre in float mode, can record at extremely conservative levels because float encoding has virtually no clipping ceiling. This is useful on set, but the resulting files often look nearly silent in a DAW waveform. An editor or assistant who receives them without context may think the files are empty.
Normalizing on the way out of the conform step means the files are already at a usable level when they land in post. No separate gain-staging step required.
The option works on any bit depth, 16-bit, 24-bit, or float, but it's most valuable for float backup recordings.
What gets preserved, and where it lands
The output files are standard WAV files with the original metadata intact: bEXT, iXML, and the backup's own channel and track names. The timecode in the output is updated to reflect the new start point. Files over 4 GB are handled as RF64 throughout. Trimmed files load straight back into the session with the right start timecode, ready for a sound report.
Output format is yours to choose. Keep original holds the backup's own sample rate and bit depth and copies the samples across unchanged, which is the option to take when you want the audio bit-for-bit. Match reference converts to the primary recorder's format in a single pass, and Custom lets you name the sample rate and bit depth yourself. Normalizing applies gain, so it changes the samples by definition.
You can send everything to one folder, or choose Same as Source and have each conformed take filed into a 'Conformed' folder beside the reference take it belongs to, which keeps it with the rest of the day rather than with the backup drive.
When to use this
- You ran a continuous backup recorder all day and need per-take files to hand off alongside the primaries
- Your belt pack recordings overlap multiple takes and need to be sliced into individual clips
- You recorded a mic inside a car, a prop, or any location you couldn't access during the shoot and the recorder ran continuously
- Your primary recorder missed a take due to a bug or human error, the secondary is the only source and you need to extract the right TC window
- You need to extract a specific TC range from a multi-hour recording for QC or review
- Your secondary recorder cut in different places than your primary and the take structures don't match
- A specific channel in your primary poly WAV was unusable and the backup has a clean recording of the same source
- Your backup recordings were captured in 32-bit float at low levels and need gain-staging before handoff
- You have the day's sound report but not the primary files, and still need the backups cut to the take list
Conclusion
Conforming secondary recordings doesn't have to be a manual editing job. Whether you're dealing with backup files, continuously running placed mics, or recovery situations where the primary wasn't rolling, if your files have accurate timecode metadata, Wave Copilot can align them automatically. Free 14-day trial for Windows, macOS and Linux.