Replacing silences with background noise of the movie

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I have a movie with bad quality audio, the sound not being loud enough I need to amplify, thus I hear the background noise but sometime there is no sound at all for like 0,2s and it’s quite annoying when it happens. So, I think the best would be to replace those silences with the background noise, is there any way to do this without editing each silence one by one ?

2

I think that can be done with [u]ducking[/u].

I can’t recommend the particular tools & settings, but in general ducking works by side-chaining a compressor/gate (or a compressor/gate effect plug-in) while mixing two signals.

In this case you’d need to make a constant noise background track that’s the same length of the move.

Then, you mix the noise with the existing track with ducking, so the extra noise track is ducked (muted) whenever the main track has sound.

When the main track has no sound, ducking stops and the silent main track and the noise track are mixed “normally”.

It might be tricky if different scenes have different amounts of background noise.


P.S.
I know what you mean… I’ve only noticed this on older movies… We aren’t even aware of the background sound 'till it cuts-out (I assume they are using a noise gate as a type of noise reduction). But when the background goes suddenly silent, it sounds like you’ve just lost the audio and it’s distracting.

3

You can use the auto duck effect to replace the silence with noise.

(this post is parallel to the previous one, thus the similarities)
Import the audio.
Generate noise.

  • either thru the Generate menu.
  • or by copying a longer silent part from the original and repeating it to match the length.
    generate two channels in order to make a stereo track.
    The noise should be the first track and the sound track the second.
    Select the entire first track and deselect the second one.
    Call the auto duck feature.
    The threshold should be a bit over the digital silence, e.g. -60 dB.
    The reduction could be somewhere over 10 dB.
    Try the other parameters (the times should be considerably shorter than the default, i.e. some ms).
4

Thanks a lot, I will try this.