Topic: Good results using Audacity for compression

[datbrad]

Just wanted to relay my satisfaction with using Audacity to apply light compression to a SBD recording with vocals that were too strong in the mix. I recorded NRPS here in Richmond last week, took the lazy route and went for the board patch, only to wish I had run my mics after listening to the recording.

My friend Keith who was also taping off the board that night said that the compressor was not being used live on the mix, allowing the vocals to spike above the peak gain level of the instruments fairly often.

Thinking about this later after listening to the raw mix, I decided to play around with the compression funtion in Audacity. I had used it only once before on an acoustic recording where the applause between songs was louder than the music, so I used the compression feature to harness the loud clapping after each song ended. It worked well as the threshold was set where the music was not affected, just the applause.

For this SBD recording, I tried several different combinations of variables, and ended up with -12db threshold, 5:1 compression ratio, with a 0.1 sec attack time, normalized to 0db. The improvement is noticable. The vocal peaks no longer rise above the instrument peaks, and the mix overall is smoother with the slightly reduced dynamics.

Just wanted to recount this story in case others have recordings with anything peaking noticably above the mix and wish they could fix it using Audacity if that is their audio software of choice.

[Brian Skalinder]

What version of Audacity are you using?  Last I checked (it's been a while), the compression feature in Audacity didn't work.  Glad to hear it does, now. 

[datbrad]

Brian, I will have to check the version when I get home tonight and will try to post a reply for reference, but I know it's at least as old as summer/fall 2006.

I tried the peak limiter funtion in Audacity a while back and did not find it worked as well as the compression feature.

The flow I used was to click on the opened file to highlight it, then I dropped down the effects box to select compression. Once there, I picked the variables, clicked OK, and waited. It did not immediately show the changed wave form. It took several minutes, and then the compressed version replaced the original, where I could see the marked changes due to the compression.

I opened the original back up again in another window and toggled back and forth for playback to see what differences I could hear. I did this multiple times, at one point having 4 different versions of the edited file based on compression ratio/threshold/attack time each in the separate windows Audacity creates for each file opened.

I was then able to listed to each one and compare them and ended up picking the one I metioned in my original post. Seemed to work just fine. Later, Brad