Audio Spectrum Plugin Over-Represents Bass

[Brian.edu]

I'm trying to use the audio spectrum plugin to create a visualizer for a song I made, but the visualizer seems to think there's way more bass then there actually is. I have a single bass line track in the whole song, and it's quite quiet, but the frequency bands that represent the lower frequencies I have are always huge, and the ones that represent the actual singing and instrumental are barely visible. I've tried making the start and end frequencies higher, but then the visualizer bars become tiny, and I'm forced to increase the maximum height a ton, which makes the whole thing look really rough. Is there any way to make the visualizer react more strongly to certain frequencies?

[Richard M Knight]

Could you eq the audio track?

[Mylenium]

Without seeing your actual audio waveform we can't really tell you much, but as was already said you may need to do some audio processing. What you see is a typical sign of the file not being normalized correctly and to produce more evenly speread out spectra you may need to run it through a parametric or graphic EQ and even out the distribution of the frequency bands.

Mylenium

[Rick Gerard]

If you have Audition, open up the audio track and EQ it to emphasize what you want to emphasize. It's pretty easy to see what is going on with the tools in Audition. Save the equalized audio as a reference only audio track and use that to drive the animation. If you don't have access to Audition, duplicate the audio track, use AE's EQ tools, Pre-compose, then mute and convert the pre-composed, equalized audio track to drive the animation.