Topic: Compressing acoustic show (SF 8.0)

[cd2go]

Hello,
    I'm working on an acoustic show where the audience claps are louder than the music. The loudest part of the music hits at -3.1dB while the clapping goes right to 0dB, not over.  I would like to amplify 3dB so that the music is at -0.1, but the clapping gets compressed. Should I normalize via RMS to do this?  I'm assuming I would scan levels and then amplify 3dB from that point; does this sound okay?  If so, what about the attack and release settings, do these affect the quality of the music? (the defaults are at 200) I just don't want to affect the dynamic range or quality of the "music" portion of the file.

Thanks in advance,
james

[John Kary]

You want to use an audio envelope (usually called volume automation) in this case.  Raise the audio level during the song, but then bring it back down before the clapping starts.

[Brian Skalinder]

What kuky said will work, though it creates more manual work (but not massively more work) having to amplify the music sections independently.  Also, compression and/or volume envelopes will do the job in this case.  I usually find it best, though more time consuming, to compress (or adjust with volume envelope) each applause section independently.  You won't impact the quality of the music because you're not applying compression or VE to the music itself, only the applause sections.  I'd compress/VE the applause sections so they're sufficiently lower than the music, and then peak normalize afterwards (this removes the need to amplify the audio manually, as in kuky's suggestion).  For applause, I've found a very short attack setting for compression works best.  FWIW, I think VE sounds better, but is more time consuming, than compression, and in some cases using both compression and VE works best.  Even though I find it a bit more time consuming, VE can be worth it, and the learning curve is fairly quick.