A new trick with Audacity

[reggind]

How many times have you been trying to pick up on something whispered or what not in an audio file, only to get your ears nuked out a few seconds later by something loud. You can keep your finger on the volume slider, but that is hard. As an aside, it is funny for as much simpler as doing a lot of things in the digital realm is, some things were just a lot easier back in the analog days... Anyway, I found myself trying to listen to something quiet right before something loud and it hit me. I may be able to use the limiter to my advantage.

Limiters were big things back in the days of tape. They keep a signal below a certain level. They do not do anything until that level is reached. The idea is to set the limiting threshold as low as you can. You do this by Tagging the entire file. Go into the effect menu and choose the limiter and select soft limit from the drop down. Turn the input gain sliders as well as the limit to sliders all the way down. The default hold time is fine to start with and make sure you have no selected for apply make up gain. Run this once or twice. You should see the big loud things get significantly smaller, but the really small things are left untouched. You can run this a few times.

When you are done with one or two of five runs of the limiter, you can use the amplify tool to bring the overall gain back up and give a listen.

You should find that now there is still a difference between loud and quiet things, but the difference is not nearly as ear blasting as it used to be.

[tweaktweak]

Ha. Good tip. To be fair Limiters are still a big thing in the digital age.

I don't seem to have a limiter in my list of stock effects. Maybe I have an old version, I never use Audacity, I find it a pain to use. I suppose you can use the compressor effect and set the ratio to 10:1. I'd consider filtering and rumble or hum first. Less needless junk to get effected.

[reggind]

Definitely clean up the file first, but the limiter IMHO is a lot more useful than the compressor in this case. The compressor, which I used to like, also brings up the quiet things. Once in a while this is good, but more often than not it just drives you mad with his and even worse, hiss modulated with the loud bits of audio. The soft limiter is actually a much more natural sounding effect. You can hear the under the breath "oh yea" right before what was the ear splitting loud orgasm. It will still be pretty loud but not defining.

As I often remark in these things, people listen for different reasons. One of my favorite things is picking out the little under the breath comments that take place once in a while. They are very challenging to pick out, and often times picking them out kills the overall fidelity of the file. Sometimes I will go as far as slowing the entire thing down 15 to 20% and than slowing the tempo alone another 5 to 10% just to slow thing down enough to follow.

Limiters and compressors still have their uses but now it is more for artistic expression than trying to fit music with a 60db dynamic range onto tape with perhaps a 40db dynamic range.

[tweaktweak]

I agree. I like the same things and will listen to the quietest sections dozens of times to pick something out as opposed to the orgasms or whatever.

While I suppose compressors and limiters are used more artistically I think it's because we have more at our disposal thanks to plug ins. Though with higher track counts and more instruments to have to cram into a mix I'll often use a limiter to make things dynamically smaller to fit.

[harryanderson1]

Thanks for sharing this! Have been playing around with Audacity as its nice and easy to use ad you can get some reasonable result without to much effort