Matching voice levels from a telephone recording

[ixodid]

I record my telephone conversations and on some recordings, the volume level of the other person's voice is quite a bit lower than my voice. The recording is one track.

I saw the tutorial that suggested to change the ratio in the Dynamic Range Compressor from 2:1 to 4:1 - I tried that and found it made very little improvement - I tried it both with and without "Compress based on peaks" checked.

Is there any other way to get the voice levels closer to each other?

[kozikowski]

The guaranteed way is to use the envelope tool and jog the volume back and forth word by word, increasing during the far side words and reducing back to normal for you.

You might try Chris's Compressor. That's a look-ahead broadcast compressor that does a very good job of evening out volume variations.

http://theaudacitytopodcast.com/chriss- ... -audacity/

All these compressors have thresholds where if the far side is too quiet, it's treated as noise and ignored. You picked a hard one.

Now you know why we urge if at all possible record the two sides on separate tracks. In the case of Skype, Pamela Professional and Pamela Business will both do that. I think Total Recorder will do that, too.

Calling into a Skype account is ideal even if the far side is on a telephone. The software and the telco system do a fine job of splitting the conversations.

Koz

[ragnar.jensen]

You might try out The Levelator http://www.conversationsnetwork.org/levelator.
Its only task in life is "...adjusts the audio levels within your podcast or other audio file for variations from one speaker to the next."

--
Ragnar