Complete newbie here and trying to complete a project for work. We have music we have licensed and voice recordings that need to be laid over the music. I’ve done this sort of thing with video before on a Windows machine, but never on a mac, and after reading reviews Audacity sounded like the software I needed to get. It seems like this should be pretty simple, but:
This is telephone hold music with personalized scripts for marketing purposes. I think what I need to do, to have the music start out at 100% volume then quickly fade to like 30%, then come back up between clips, then refade. And it seems like the Adjustable Fade plugin is what I need to use to get that, but it is giving me an error.
In reading the forum, it seems like the usual culprit with this is the Nyquist files not being in the correct location. I’ve reinstalled from my .dmg and did drag the Audacity icon to the Application folder as instructed. The effects are there, and show as active in the Plugins window.
Any ideas on how I can get this to work? If there is another way to accomplish this somewhat simply I’m all ears as well. Mostly, as it’s for work, I want to get it done quickly
Sure… I opened up Audacity, and imported my music track and audio track. I shifted the audio track over a little so it would start a few seconds in to the playback, then selected the music track. All of it, because I’m not really sure how Adjustable Fade works and I was wanting to play with the settings.
Then I went to Effect → Adjustable Fade, and the dialog popped up. I set it to Fade Down, set the numbers to 100 and 30 (I find the Start (or end) and End (or start) confusing, so I tried them both ways. Then I clicked Preview, and it says “Adjustable Fade Error” in a dialog with an OK button.
Preview does not work in Adjustable Fade if the selected track is stereo.
I’ve now fixed the bug for the next release of Audacity, but the new version is not compatible with older versions of Audacity.
The effect should still work on stereo tracks when applied, just that Preview throws this error.
A good way to test / practice with this effect is to apply it to generated tones (“Generate menu > Tone”).
This sounds like the Auto-duck effect might be more what you’re looking for, rather than the adjustable fade. I use it for fading down bumper music in the podcast I edit when the host is speaking.
