Automatic Ducking

Greg Hertfelder wrote on 3/27/2008, 2:15 PM

I need to create a music-on-hold audio loop that will feature intermittent speech messages. The music will be on track 1 and the intermittent speech will be on track 2. I know how to use manually-adjusted Audio Volume Envelopes, but it would be tedious for this task.

Is there a plug-in that would automatically duck (lower the gain) on the music track when the speech would occur, and permit the music to raise to the normal gain after the speech? This would be useful for video production, too.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 3/27/2008, 6:14 PM

If you have the speach substantially lounder than the music you can add compression to the master output then it will get you close to what you want. You'll lose a lot of the dynamics this way, but for music-on-hold you probably don't want it to be very dynamic anyway.

Steven Myers wrote on 3/27/2008, 6:26 PM

A compressor with a side-chain function.

barleycorn wrote on 3/28/2008, 4:56 AM

Excalibur's audio tools should do what you want (see the http://www.jetdv.com/excalibur55/vids/Excalibur5VoiceOver.wmv Voice Over in Excalibur 5[/link] demonstration).

Greg Hertfelder wrote on 4/8/2008, 5:49 AM

Thanks, all.

I ended up just doing a variation of Chienworks suggestion. I applied the the Wave Hammer plug-in to each track to maximize loudness of the speech (lowered the music volume), and was able to achieve dynamics suited for the telephone.

The Excalibur plug-in looks interesting, but didn't see it in time for this project.

Skaven252 wrote on 4/21/2008, 1:04 AM

Just in case you (or somebody) wants to do sidechain compression in Vegas, here's a compressor plugin you can use for it:

http://www.db-audioware.com/dB-D-dynamics-processor-more.htm

It's a VST plugin which has a "send" and "receive" function, so if you're running multiple instances, you can set one plugin to 'listen' to a signal and use it to control the compression of another instance.