Audacity Forum

Hi there,

1) How do I lower the volume of a specific part of a track? like if I want to lower the volume of the music track in the parts where I'm talking.

2) I'm recording a podcast using conference calls on Skype. It records my voice in one track, and the other people's voice in the other. The problem is some times the other people don't sound the same - some are loud and some low. Is there a way to fix this? I tried "Normalize", but that didn't work.


Appreciate your help

M55 wrote: 1) How do I lower the volume of a specific part of a track? like if I want to lower the volume of the music track in the parts where I'm talking.

A couple of ways:

1) you could just select the section of audio and then use the Amplify effect to reduce the volume. This may give you a noticeable volume discontinuity at the joins.

Or a better way
2) Use the Envelope tool (icon is two white triangles pointing in to a white dot between them, with a blue line passing through). You can set the dots as a set of reference points and use them to drag the blue line up and down - this controls the volume level, the closer the blue lines the quieter it gets.


Sorry I can't answer the Skype question - but there have been many postings about recording skype call on the Forum - try the Search function at the top right of the page.

WC

I would do this automatically with Chris's Compressor.

Chris's Compressor
http://pdf23ds.net/software/dynamic-compressor/

Split the tracks in half and apply the tool to each half and then rejoin or edit your brains out.

I change the compression ratio to .77 from the default .5 and it's amazing how much it evens out wildly varying volume changes. My specific application was to make web radio shows sound like the off-air show. Off-air goes through careful volume leveling and the web show doesn't. When somebody leans into the microphone on the air show, nothing happens, but the volume increase on the web show scares the cat.

If the voices are far enough off, even that's not going to work and you need to go in with the manual tools. Audacity 1.3 has Effect > Leveler that might be useful. That's a little brute force for my taste, but it may work for you.

Koz