The Tech Talk podcast is almost complete! Before saving and publishing the podcast, however, let's do some final tweaks to the audio to help it sound its best. We'll do that with the Essential Sound panel.
The Essential Sound panel provides us with many options for working with audio. We can tag our audio as one of four different categories — dialogue, music, sound effects, or ambient noise — and the Essential Sound panel will display tools for enhancing and repairing audio clips based on the category chosen, as well as other options for working with a specific clip.
The first thing we'll do with the Essential Sound panel is use it to lower the volume of intro_song.wav when intro.wav is playing. This is a technique known as ducking— reducing the volume of music or other background audio in order to emphasize dialogue or other audio elements. To do this, you'll need to tag the intro_song clip as music and the intro clip as dialogue, then turn on ducking for intro_song. You'll also follow the same process for the outro section of the podcast.
To select the first clip to set the category for, on the Intro/Outro track,
Click intro
To assign a category to intro.wav, in the Essential Audio panel,
Click
To select the next clip to set the category for, on the Music track,
Click intro_song
To assign a category to intro_song.wav,
Click
Ensure intro_song.wav is selected on the Music timeline.
To turn on ducking, in the Ducking section of the Essential Sound panel,
Click the checkmark to the right of Ducking
To indicate what sorts of clips should be ducked, in the Duck Against category, if necessary,
Click
Now that intro_song is set to duck against any clips that are categorized as dialogue, you'll notice something different about the intro_song clip:
The intro_song clip now has a dotted line running through it, which dips lower where the intro clip overlaps intro_song. That dotted line indicates that intro_song is ducked against dialogue clips, and since intro is categorized as dialogue, the volume for intro_song is lowered so the intro clip can be heard.
Let's go ahead and set the outro_song clip to duck against the outro clip.
Select the outro clip on the Intro/Outro timeline, and assign it the category Dialogue.
Select the outro_song clip on the Music timeline, and assign it the category Music.
Ensure the outro_song clip is selected on the Music timeline.
To turn on ducking, in the Ducking section of the Essential Sound panel,
Click the checkmark to the right of Ducking
To indicate what sorts of clips should be ducked, in the Duck Against category,
Click
Save the session.
The next things we'll do with the Essential Sound panel involve enhancing the sound of the dialogue clips that make up the podcast, and ensuring that the clips are all the same volume. To enhance the sound of the dialogue, we'll be using the EQ option in the Clarity group to adjust how our audio sounds. There are a number of presets available to achieve different sound quality — we'll be using the Subtle Boost preset to help give our dialogue a more polished sound. To make sure our audio clips are all at the same volume, we'll use the Auto-Match option in the Loudness group to set the three dialogue clips to Audition's predefined loudness standard.
, Click Subtle Boost (Female)