Fade out to background and fade back in

Feedback and Discussion Forum Adding Features
1

Soundforge, a lot of years ago, had a very useful tool that allowed to fade a selection, say to 50% volume in 3 seconds, then 6 seconds after the track ending, fading it back in to 100%. It was done by using very simple parameters, like the ones I just described. This allowed to use the track as intro, fade to background or bed for speaking over it, and then coming back to full volume to end the clip. I have not been able to do this smoothly with Audacity. Maybe I have not read the proper tutorial for doing it, or maybe that effect still doesn’t exist.

If there’s a way to do it (not using envelope, as that is quite complicated and not smooth), please if you can point me to a step by step guide. Otherwise, it would be great as maybe an add on to adjustable fade?

2

Audacity has a few tools for this kind of thing.

  1. The Envelope Tool (though personally I find this tool far too fiddly for more than occasional use)

  2. The Adjustable Fade effect: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/adjustable_fade.html
    I find that the presets in this effect are sufficient in most cases.

  3. The Auto Duck effect: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/auto_duck.html
    Very handy when doing a lot of “ducking”.

3

Thanks a lot. As English is not my native language, I’m sure I would not have guessed the auto duck results from the name, but it seems exactly what I was looking for, taking down the volume with a smooth fade and then back up with the same not abrupt effect. I will try it immediately. Thanks again.

4

Hi again, Steve. After trying the auto duck effect, it doesn’t help me to do what I want. I don’t have a second audio track with speech for the effect to work with, because the original speech is in a video, and then I would have to extract the audio from it, do the auto duck thing and then add the whole resulto to the video as audio. The pattern the auto duck does is exactly what I want, but I was looking for it to not be defined by a second audio track, just plain do it at the single track I will be using as my background music, so I can use directly at Movie Maker. After x seconds fade down to -x db, keep that volume for x time and the in x seconds fade up to original volume. I don’t jnow if I’m being clear, sorry.

5

Seems I managed to do what I wanted, adding an extra step. Added a second track, generated in it a constant tone for the desired lenght I wanted the music to go to the background, and then applied the auto duck. The result is what I needed, so now I know it can be done. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Wish it could be done without generating the tone track, though.