AUDACITY COMPRESSOR FULL

Like any other audio production, cleaning, or enhancement tool, it’s possible to over-do it. Their default settings (Attack 0.20 secs, Release 1.0 Secs) will be absolutely fine for most of the audio you record.Ī before and after of an audio track with heavy Compression applied. To be honest, it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to tinker with the AT and RT settings. These are going to work off of your Threshold and Noisefloor settings, which we covered above. These settings are basically here to tell Audacity how quickly it should react to these changes.Īttack Time tells Audacity to start applying compression, whilst Release Time tells it to stop. Spoken word audio is dynamic, and constantly changing. Anything above 4:1 is considered fairly heavy, and would be used in more extreme cases where there’s vast differences in the levels of the source material. Commonly though, 2:1 will be used to apply some light treatment to a track. There’s no ‘ideal’ setting here, because it completely depends on the audio you’re working with. It’s basically the strength of the Compression. Whilst the above settings help tell the Compressor what parts of the audio you’d like it to work with, the Ratio setting tells it how much compression you’d like it to apply. If you feel that this room noise is being boosted in-between words, you can increase the Noisefloor level to prevent it. It can be used to make sure “silence” itself isn’t amplified during pauses in speech. This setting further reinforces what the Threshold is doing. If you set Threshold to the quietest spoken word parts of your waveform, anything louder than those quiet parts will be involved in the compression process. This is to avoid things like movement sounds and breaths being pulled up and amplified. The Threshold determines how loud the audio has to get before the compressor starts working. Here are the different settings you’ll find. You can access the Audacity Compressor by going to Effect then Compressor.

You’ll find a Compression feature in pretty much any audio editing programme.

AUDACITY COMPRESSOR FULL

If you’re itching for more info on this, then check out our full article on how audio compression works. If you had to constantly adjust the volume of the show you were listening to, because some parts were too quiet and other parts too loud, then it’s likely this show would’ve benefited from some Compression.Ĭompression, in its simplest form, is bringing the louder bits and the quieter bits closer together for a more consistent overall volume level. Have you ever been listening to something whilst driving, walking along a busy street, or sitting on a noisy bus? More than likely. To understand why Audio Compressors are useful, you need to put yourself into the shoes (earbuds?) of a podcast listener. Audio Compressors are pretty useless when it comes to that sort of thing, though. You might immediately conjure up images of yourself inflating your car or bike tyres. In this article, we’re going to switch gears, and focus on the Audacity Compressor. Recently, we took a look at its Noise Reduction Feature. Audacity is a free, open source programme you can use to record and edit your podcast.

Audacity compressor