Strangest thing. I am done mixing my podcast. And in one of my tracks i have music which fades in to open the podcast. Sounds great. But then when i do a compression on it before exporting the WAV, guess what? The compression has REMOVED the fade in, and made the entire music track the same level… NO MORE FADE-IN. Anyone experience this?
What to do?
The first place I’d look is Windows Enhanced Services.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/faq_recording_troubleshooting.html#enhancements
After that make sure Control Panel audio services doesn’t have anything “magic” running like special effects and then make sure you don’t have your VOIP or Skype napping instead of fully closed.
Koz
Which compression did you use? I don’t think Audacity’s compressor will do that, but Chris’s Compressor will.
Koz
Why do you not simply exclude the Music from the compression effect - it’s compressed already?
Or do you work with chains in order to automate the process?
Yes, that is to be expected.
The purpose of dynamic compression is to even out the volume level so that quiet parts are a bit louder and loud parts are relatively less loud.
If you want compression on your vocal track(s), apply it to just the vocal track(s) before you mix down.
Thank you so much, guys. This is spot-on helpful. So I guess I have 2 choices,. and a I have a question on the second:
First, I can do the compression on the vox tracks (the audio interviews) before adding music into the mix.
But second, are you suggesting i do NOT use Chris’s compression effect? I was advised to use that. But do you guys feel the built-in compressor effect in Audacity is sufficient to compress an audio podcast with 2 vox interview tracks and intro/outro music?
Chris’s compressor should be fine for the vox.
The thing that you do not want to do is to compresses the music after you have carefully adjusted the dynamics manually (the fade effect). If the music is pre-recorded, then you will probably not want to use compression on the music at all - a little dynamic compression can sound good on music, but with pre-recorded music the sound engineer/producer will have already applied compression.
Chris’s Compressor was designed to gracefully even out volume variations in music. Koz
Chris’s compressor can behave oddly at the very start and very end of tracks causing them to become conspicuously loud.
A workaround is to copy a few seconds from your recording and paste it to the start and end, then apply Chris’s compressor, then removing the bits you’ve added at either end.
