Automate "volume inversion" in multitrack session

[donjojohannes]

Hi,

I'm no expert in the world of Audition. So maybe there is a simple way to do the following instead of doing both tracks by hand:

I have two voice tracks in a multitrack session. They are two voices of a dialogue recorded in a studio to two separate tracks.

Since the interlocuters were sitting opposite each other at the same table the mics naturally not only picked up the voice of the speaker but also faintly the voice of the second speaker. Above in the wave forms you see the result.

For character animator I need clean audio tracks with each track having its proper voice without any faint remnants of the other speaker.
So what I'm doing now is: I go through both tracks adjusting the volume by adding key points (see sample above). Since I have 7 hours of dialogie, I'm wondering if there is a faster way.

Is it possible to adjust the volume through key point data, then copy the data to the second track and invert it, so that "highs" become "lows" and vice versa?
Or is there a better way to go about it to begin with?

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions,

Johannes

[ryclark]

There are a couple of options in Audition that could help. What is the difference in level between the two different voices on each track?

One method is to use Gating from Amplitude and Compression effects menu Dynamics Processing. Try the Noise Gate presets. This effect reduces the level of the audio when it falls below a certain threshold. However the settings will need careful adjustment to match your particular audio tracks.

The second method is to use Sidechaining to make the higher level of one track reduce the level of the other one. But again this all depends on the relative level of the two voices.

[donjojohannes]

Thanks ryclark for your response.

I had noise gate on the radar, but I fear that the highest peaks of the background audio I want to eliminate are higher than the lowest peaks of the audio I want to preserve. So I ruled that option out for the particular audio I have

Sidechaining, I have not heard of. I will look into it and post my results.

Thanks

Johannes

[donjojohannes]

Ok. I looked at a quick tutorial and tried it. In principle it works but doesn't let me apply the sidechain to more than one of the tracks involved. I tried duplicating both tracks and pair them, but that did not work either. While the side chain does eliminate the second audio track output when the first track has full audio, it naturally continues to effect the second track when the second voice is heard on the first track. So while side chain works for a voice track and a music track where one consistently affects the other, in this case it naturally cannot distinguish between what is speaker one and faint speaker two in the first audio track.