Crossfading?

[philsvoice]

I'm recording voiceovers in Audacity on an iMac. To eliminate breath and mouth noises, I'd like to splice in some background noise, and then crossfade the edges. is there a way to do this (or something with the equivalent effect in Audacity 1.3 for the Mac)?

Phil

[billw58]

There are probably many ways to do that task. The first one that occurs to me is this.

- Get your snippet of background noise and put it on the clipboard
- Create a track below the voice track to hold the noise snippets
- Identify the places where you want to take out the breath and mouth noises and use the envelope tool to fade out and in
- On the lower track, click near where you want the noise snipped to be and Edit > Paste
- Fine tune the placement of the snippet with the Time Shift tool
- Adjust the fade in/out of the snippet with the Fade In and Fade Out effects, or with the envelope tool.

-- Bill

[steve]

What sort of "background noise" are you thinking of?
Another option would be to use a "Gate" to lower the volume during quiet sections.
Here's a Nyquist plug-in that can do this: noisegate.ny

This could be used in conjunction with adding some kind of background sound (noise or music) on a second track.
You could also use the "Auto Duck" effect to lower the level of the background sound track automatically when there is talking on the voice track.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Auto_Duck

[philsvoice]

Great advice guys, Thank you!

Phil

[billw58]

What sort of "background noise" are you thinking of?

My guess would be "room tone" so when you duck out the voice you don't get a hole in the sound.

-- Bill