Topic: soft show, loud applause, not sure what to do

[yltfan]

So...
Did you finish up your work on this? How'd it come out?

[EarlyMorningRain]

I've been messing around in Sound Forge with the click and crackle repair tool using the "for manually fixing small selections" preset. It seems to work better when you zoom in on the clapping sections and select the area you are going to repair. 

Agree about Sony's click and crackle in the "smalls sections" setting.  It really is for small sections and not the whole file.

I don't see this option in SF 8, what version do guys have?

Also curious as to what the OP got for finished results....?

[kubacheck]

for the uninitiated, when some of you say to "set a hard limit", what exactly do you do to achieve that??.... I've got a recording with clapping that starts before the song ends, so the envelope tool won't work so well, but I want to raise the levels of the music at least to the level of the applause, if that's possible.....

[edtyre]

for the uninitiated, when some of you say to "set a hard limit", what exactly do you do to achieve that??.... I've got a recording with clapping that starts before the song ends, so the envelope tool won't work so well, but I want to raise the levels of the music at least to the level of the applause, if that's possible.....

Try using the envelope tool to get most of the clapping lower, then use the hard limiter on just the section of clapping that starts before the song ends and when the song ends.
Make any sense?
I use a combination of gain envelope, compression, hard limiting and individual clap removal to do these types of problems.

Here's a screenshot of a small sample that has been "hard limited"

[ilduclo]

I have a preset that hard limits to -10db for this. I would lower that number to -4 or so if the music was louder, as with any editing, save the original unedited, experiment with short segments as per above, see what you think. For shows where the audience waits for the end of the music before applause, I always use the envelope, either after a lesser hard limit or in lieu of one. I save every show without any edits at all, raw files, then mess with copies only.

[rjp]

One tactic I've used in Audacity is to use the "auto duck" function. It's a bit of a hack: I create a separate audio track with a continuous tone and mute it, and then use auto duck to drop the applause level to something manageable. Once I've ducked all of the applause, I can delete the tone track.