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de-Amplify and Adjustable Fade in Audacity - quieting 10 loud unclipped seconds?

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chiefscribe:
How would you handle postprocessing in this situation?

A show I recorded recently includes a brief segment where the artist invited the audience to scream for ten seconds, and they did. 

Fortunately my levels were set so that there's no clipping, but that ten seconds of screaming is significantly louder than the rest of the show.

I don't normalize, but I sometimes use Amplify in Audacity to set the maximum dB to -0.06. 

If the loud part were music I'd leave it as is and just live with the rest of the recording being relatively quiet, but since it's just audience screaming I am wondering about using Amplify to make that part peak at the same level as the loudest part of the rest of the show (-8.09 dB would do the trick from my experiments). 

When I duplicated the project to experiment with this, the onset of the screaming sounds fine because there's a quiet pause beforehand, but there's a noticeable shift when the de-Amplified part ends - the background noise suddenly gets louder.  I was trying to use Adjustable Fade in Audacity to smooth this over but I don't have any experience using that effect and don't know the best practices for how much to select and whether to select a longer span of time then progressively shorter periods and S-fade in or just do it once, and how to figure out the percentage to start with. 

The little shift is not during any music or talking, so it's not a terrible tragedy if it has to stay as is, but I would love to make it smoother if possible. 

Any advice for a newbie? 

chiefscribe:
or should I be using the Limiter?

admkrk:
I would use a volume envelope.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/envelope_tool.html

AbbyTaper:
Or...amplify the parts before and after the screaming section so that they peak at the same level as the scream.   Or just cut that section out entirely. :yack:

nassau73:
I would normally handle something like this in RX and I don't use Audacity.

However, you might try something RX like. If you look at the Spectrogram view for that section, can you identify the audience screams? If so, you can try highlighting/selecting the screams and attenuate/lower the volume on the selection.

After that, if there is band chatter or something, creating and increasing the envelope as someone else mentioned would help. I think Audacity works with envelopes the same way as RX. So you can create several "points" both before and after the segment and slowly raise the envelope at one end and decrease on the other to make things sound smoother. I've had shows where the between song banter was much lower than the music/vocal selections but it was important to the flow of the show. It took a bunch of time to handle each break but worth it in the end.

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