Okay, I am new to vegas, and must apologise for talking about Adobe Premiere in this request. I realise this is a Vegas forum, and I am only talking about Premiere to describe what I have been doing in the past, so as to get assistance in how best to achieve it in Vegas. Hope that is acceptable. Here goes.... I film stage plays, where there can be a lot of variation in volume. I record with an external mic in front of the stage. With premiere, I would chop up the audio track into the louder parts and the quieter parts, and then normalise each segment. Then a crossfade on all the joins so it sounded smooth. This normalise feature in premiere is not that good. It doesnt do anything as intelligent as make the louder parts a bit quiter AND the quiter parts a bit louder. It just takes the loudest bit it can find and reduce everything just so that bit is an acceptable level. So an actor shouting one word would be fine but the rest would then be inaudible. That is why all the chopping up needs doing. Is there a similar feature in Vegas, and if so where do I find it and is it easy to use? All I have found so far is that the audio track is automatically normalised. Maybe it is normalised in a better way on the whole clip with Vegas and my adjustments wont be so necessary, but that might be too good to be true!Perhaps someone could explain what is best for me here. Also, I cannot find a crossfade. Is there one? Yes I can fade audio clips up and down at the end, but that would mean moving an adjoining clip down a level, extending it to overlap the first one, fading the top one down and fading the bottom one up at the overlap. Same result,, but more time consuming than just slapping a crossfade over the joins. I am new to this, sorry my jargon is simple. I have been doing this job for about five years, but tend to only know about the parts that I need, that is why I come accross as not very tek-savvy!!! I need to clarify a few things to know that is worth me moving to Vegas. The reason for this is because I will need to start doing HiDef sooner or later, and there is no way I can afford brand new Adobe software! So it will be Vegas or staying Standard def. The other point is that the human ear is very good at adjusting to live souinds, but not so good with a speaker. If I did not make these adjustments, my customers would be constantly twiddling the volume up and down whilst watching their DVD! So this is probably the most tricky part of my job. It can be up to ten cuts in one minute of the audio, for a play that is up to two hours long! So I hope you get the drift! Thanks very much. Any help aprreciated, but plain English preferred. Thanks in anticipation.