Audacity Forum

Hi guys, im sure some of you might help me with this.

Im looking for a feature that allows you to mute either higher volume parts of a song or lower volume parts.

For example:

the sample starts and you barely hear a thing in terms of music and all of a sudden a vocal is heard at higher volume than the background music.
is there a way to filter or mute in terms of dB levels with a threshold where you want to mute or cut the volume below or above that threshold?

so, in effect, you can be left with either the background sound that is low volume or vocal (or other instruments) that have higher volume.

Keep in mind im not trying to elevate all sounds to sound the same, just trying to mute them (silence). you might say to use the silence command, but that takes too much
time manually, im looking for a script or tool/software that can automatically mute all sounds (or frequencies, depends) below or above a certain threshold set.

I hope you guys understand what im looking for, and im not sure if this is the correct place to post this. Thanks!

Dan

suppressing low sounds is easy. Effect > Noise Gate. It's designed to strip off quiet noises in performances. Higher is harder. I don't think there's a pre-baked effect for that — although Noise Gate may have an option.

You understand it's not going to split a performance into just low or just high? When a gate allows a high level sound to go through, it's going to allow everything through, low and high. Similarly, when it "ducks" a high level sound, the show is going to go to silence, not leave the low sounds alone.

This question is dangerously close to "help me split the violins from the oboes in the orchestra." We can't do that, either.

Koz

Duplicate the track, apply the noise gate and invert one track, this should you give back the suppressed low-volume sounds. The lookahead might interfere with that though.

I don't think there is a feature request here so I moved this to "Audio Processing".

Audacity does not ship with a Noise Gate but you can install a Nyquist Noise Gate from http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyqui ... Noise_Gate . Installation instructions for Nyquist plug-ins are at: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Downl ... ns#install .


Gale

Thanks guys, that Nyquist plugin is exactly what I needed! many thanks to all!

Dan