Question

My friend and I record a podcast using Anchor, and it places both of our voices into one track, which I pull into Studio One to edit (taking out silence, etc.) Sometimes their app causes one of our voices to be louder than the other persons from time to time during the recording.

What I've been doing is highlighting any parts where our voice(s) need to be higher/lower, then using Split Range to increase/decrease volume as needed. However, this takes ALOT of time to do! Is there a way I do this automatically? For example, is there something that would let me automatically set parameters so that nothing dips below a certain volume nor above a certain volume?

Answer 1

Hi.  If you highlight the entire audio event and then hit alt+n (option+n on a Mac) you can "normalise the audio".  If there are phrases that are much louder than other, then you could use clip gain manually or a compressor.  But a "quick and dirty" way is normalisation using the alt+n method.  This "normalisation" method analyses the audio, and essentially brings the loudest part of the audio to 0dB, processing the rest of the sound wave in proportion to what was added to the loudest part of the signal. If you still have phrases with massive loudness differences you could normalise section by section by splitting regions.  This saves resources compared to adding mixtool gain or some other compression method.