Topic: Sony Vegas - Audio balance control?

[Wiesel]

Hey guys,

I've been using Sony Vegas quite some time to sync my audio recordings with my videos and I recently started to do all the audio processing in Vegas as well, instead of doing it separately with another application. The problem I'm now facing is that Vegas apparently doesn't offer a balance control for stereo tracks, or a volume control that is able to control the left and right channel volume separately. How are you guys doing this? Does anybody know a good and free VST plugin for this task?

I know there's the complicated way of duplicating the track, setting it to left respectively right channel only, panning it in either direction, adjusting the volume accordingly and mixing it back together on the master or a bus... but there must be a simpler solution!?

[beatkilla]

Not sure exactly what your trying to do but right click on your audio track choose left channel only then dulplicate track and choose right channel only.Right clicking on the track and choosing in Channels drop down.Nothing to hard about that.OR if your problem is that when you pan the track balance slider left and right your merging both channels right and left the solution is to right click ON the balance slider and choose Constant power.If thats not what you mean than please be more specific.

[Wiesel]

Thanks but the method you described is what I meant with "the complicated way" in my first post. The problem with this method for me is that when I set a track to left or right only, the sound is still sent to the left AND right channel of the master bus. Therefore I additionally need to use the pan slider to avoid that the mono channel is sent to the left and right channel of the master bus, or am I missing something here?

What I want to do is adjust the volume of a channel of a stereo track to match the level of the second channel (e.g. match the left channel's volume to the right channel). The problem is that with Vegas' inbuilt means I can only control the volume of the whole track, not the volume of each channel in a track separately. There's just the panning slider which I don't want to use since it mixes the L/R channels together which isn't desirable in this case.

[beatkilla]

There is a volume slider on each audio track header if not than hold down control and shift while opening vegas to reset to default.I don't think duplicating the track and making one left and the other right channel is a complicated workflow though.Just do that and control the volume slider on each track.You really don't need to use a master bus.Just render your audio to a new wave file.

[Wiesel]

I just tried the method as you described it again and there's still a problem... here's what I did:

1. open a new empty project
2. drag in a stereo wav file to the timeline
(vegas creates a stereo track from the wav file)
3. right click onto the track, choose "left channel only"

when I now play back the project, I can hear the left-channel-only track in the left and right channel of my speakers. To avoid that I need to
4. set the pan slider to 100% left, but that doubles the output volume of the track, so I have to
5. set the volume slider to 50% as well

If I repeat these steps (except the first) analogous for the right channel I get the desired ability to control the volume of each channel separately. Good.

Where it gets complicated is if I need to apply this procedure to a track in a multitrack matrix project, where the volume levels in vegas etc are already set correctly, and just the balance of a track is messed up a little bit. With this procedure I'd have to readjust many level / effect settings, which isn't impossible but annoying.

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While writing this reply I did another search on the net and I guess I finally found a solution, the free "RS BALANCE PRO" VST plugin which can be found here: http://www.retrosampling.se/vst.htm (haven't had a chance to try it out yet)

[rsimms3]

Sony Vegas 9.0

1. Click "view"
2. Select "mixer"
3. "unlock" on mixer
4. Adjust individual channels
5. "lock" to adjust both channels together after adjusting the balance l/r to increase/decrease volume at the same level

[exxile]

I've often wondered about doing this in Vegas also, as opposed to a standalone audio prog. The above suggestion works but appears to affect all audio tracks in the project globally - wonder if it's possible to adjust multiple audio tracks individually?