Does auto duck only apply to the first track?

Special Interest Groups Audacity in Education
1

As you can see in the screencast on the URL below, I’m creating a series of language learning videos where I insert audios on top of a soundtrack.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/19HlXBSBCkPOID9XBmSFIzo1NI2xMM3Zy/view?usp=sharing

Sometimes I may have about 20 audio chunks, and I apply “auto duck” on each one of them.

I’ve tried applying auto duck to lower tracks, but it only works as long as I put all audio chunks in the first track.

Is this the only way I can do it? Can you think of a more practical solution?

2

From the Audacity manual:

Note that the first unselected track underneath the selected track(s) acts as the control track.


This looks like a lot of steps, but some may not be necessary, and it’s much quicker to do than to type out :wink:

  1. Get all of your audio clips imported first. They may be in multiple tracks.
  2. Move the “music track” (the one whose volume you want to modify) to the top. This is most easily done from “the track’s drop-down menu > Move track to top”.
  3. Select all (“Ctrl + A”)
  4. Move focus to the top track (“Up cursor” until the top track has the yellow border).
  5. Press “Enter” to toggle the selection of the first track so that it is NOT selected.
  6. “Tracks menu > Mix > Mix and Render to New Track”. This will create a new “Mix” track at the bottom of the project.
  7. Move the mix track to the top of the project.
  8. Move the “music track” (the one whose volume you want to modify) to the top.
  9. Select the top (“music”) track
  10. Apply Auto Duck.
  11. Delete the “mix” track.
3

Great, thanks!

4

What makes you say that? The OP includes a video that clearly shows that they are using Audacity and not “a video editing software”. :confused:


That’s not a solution. Audacity is perfectly capable of applying AutoDuck. Having to learn how to use an expensive alternative to Audacity does not solve the problem, it just shifts the problem onto other software.


Surely “Audacity” is dedicated audio processing software.


“multiband compression” is not “auto duck”, they are completely different effects. Yes you can use a compressor with side-chain to perform auto-duck, but that’s a different thing to “multiband compression”.