How do I Cut music track when voice comes in?

Special Interest Groups Audio Processing
1

Hi,

I am trying to achieve the following: I want to have a music track playing at normal volume, but when a voiceover track has a voice on it I would like to drop the music track to a lower level and get it to come back when the voice has finished talking (whenever the voice track drops below a certain threshold). What is this called? And is there some automatic way of mixing the tracks to achieve this, since a manual approach is out of the question.

Thanks,
Michael

2

There is always the manual approach with the envelope tool. That has the advantage of complete control over the effect.

The automatic approach is called Effect > Auto Duck in Audacity 1.3.12. Care must be taken to keep from pumping the background if the announcer likes to take … the … dialog … in … little chunks. That’s where manual comes in handy.

Koz

3

Cool, thanks, that makes sense, I’ll give it a try.

4

This tutorial might help: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Tutorial_-_Mixing_a_Narration_With_Background_Music

– Bill