Attenuate with smooth transitions

[Samse26]

I have a live recording where the applause is much louder than the music in between. I would like to attenuate the applause-parts by a certain amount, so that later on I can normalize the whole recording without the applause dominating the max. possible amplification.
I placed range labels on the applause parts, but instead of a hard attenuation (with Amplify and negative value of ~-12 dB) I would prefer smooth transitions into and out of the attenuated part.
I can do this with the envelope tool, but it’s pretty tedious to place all the individual envelope points by hand for a large number of ranges.
Can anyone suggest an easier way how I can achieve an amplification/attenuation by a specific value for a given range, including smooth transitions into and out of the max. value of amplification/attenuation?

[DVDdoug]

This might be MORE work, but what I do is split the recording into individual songs and fade-in and fade-out the applause, shortening it if that’s helpful. Then you may not need the envelope tool.

If you wish, you can cut-out and save some sections of applause. If you want to re-insert them, you can adjust the volume (maybe with the Amplify effect) and also fade-in and fade-out those bits.

Then you can splice everything back together with smooth-unnoticeable Crossfades.

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I’ve made audio files from lots of video concerts. I like to make a full concert length file, plus individual files for each song. On the individual songs I like a short 1 or 2 seconds of crowd noise faded-in at the beginning, and longer applause fade-out at the end. I’ll often steal the applause from different parts of the recording, and sometimes even from different concerts.

With the full recording I’ll take-out “excessive” gaps between songs (usually the longer gaps are OK when you’re watching the video) or “excessive” talking, etc.

[Samse26]

Thanks for your suggestions. In this specific case I decided to pull out the applause sections into a second track, and then amplify the song-track different from the applause-track, to avoid clipping and get close to an even loudness level. I used the split points as track labels and exported clips split by those markers. So whoever wants to listen just to the music can skip the applause parts, and those who want to listen to the full concert can just listen from start to end.
This left s few loudness steps between the end a song (when people started applauding too early) and the (attenuated) applause. I ignored this for this time, futhermore I ran into this problem with crossfades which kept me from smoothing out these transitions - will do next time.
In short: I learned a lot about how to treat parts of a recording differently and will be happy use more crossfading

[steve]

You could use the “Adjustable Fade” effect: Adjustable Fade - Audacity Manual

Note that you would need to use it twice - once to fade down, and again to fade back up.
When fading down, click and drag across the first half of the required transition and fade down from 100% to a lower level. Then hold down the “Shift” key, and click near the left edge of the selection and drag to the right, past the mid point, to where you want the level to be back to normal. Then use the Adjustable fade again but with the fade direction changed to fade in.

[Samse26]

thanks for the reference - never tried this one before.
But I guess that for a simple transition between two clips with not much perceived loudness difference, a simple crossfade would do. Full work-flow:

1. split applause clips and move into separate track,
2. normalize song and applause track separately
3. insert applause clips back into song-track
4. cross-fade at split-points