Audio

Audio in Evidor is handled per-track. Each audio track has its own chain of processors: volume, pan, high-pass, hum removal, EQ, noise gate, compressor, and ducking. This page covers each of them and how to use them together.

Per-clip vs. per-track

There are two levels of audio control:

Per clip - volume, pitch, fade in, fade out, and mute. These live in the inspector's Audio section.
Per track - the whole processing chain above. These live in the audio effects dialog, reached from the FX button on the track head or from the mixer.

Both apply. The clip's own volume is multiplied by the track's volume, so a clip at 50% on a track at 80% plays at 40% of its original level.

Clip audio settings

Select a clip and open the Audio section of the inspector:

Volume - 0% to 100% (and up to 200% if you drag past the end of the slider). The default is 100%.
Pitch - shifts the pitch of the clip from -24 semitones to +24 semitones, without changing its duration.
Fade in - a linear fade from silence at the start of the clip, up to 10 seconds.
Fade out - a linear fade to silence at the end of the clip, up to 10 seconds.

The fade handles on the top of the clip in the timeline are a shortcut for the same fades. Dragging a handle right increases the fade length.

Normalize adjusts the clip's volume so its loudest peak sits at about -1 dB. It uses the peak level that was measured when the file was imported, so it only works on audio that has already been analysed.

Mute sets the clip's volume to 0%. The clip is drawn with a muted style and a small speaker-with-x icon appears in its label. This is available from the clip's right-click menu under Audio → Mute.

The mixer

Open the mixer from File → Audio mixer. It shows one vertical strip per audio track, plus a master strip on the right.

Fader - the track's volume, 0% to 200%, shown in dB next to the slider.
Meter - a stereo level meter that shows the current output of the track.
Pan - a horizontal slider from full left to full right. The label shows C for center, L for left, R for right.
M and S - mute and solo buttons.
FX - opens the audio effects dialog for that track.

The master strip controls a global gain offset applied to the whole mix. This is also what the loudness normalizer writes to.

Audio effects dialog

Click the FX button on a track head, or use the slider icon in the mixer, to open the audio effects dialog for that track. It contains the following sections.

Cleanup

Pan - the same as the mixer's pan slider, from -100 to +100.
Speech enhance preset - one click that sets a sensible dialogue chain: 55 Hz high-pass, slight presence boost at 3 kHz, mild low-shelf cut, gentle compressor, and the noise gate enabled. Useful as a starting point for a voice recording.
Low cut - a high-pass filter, 0 to 100. At 0 the filter is off; higher values raise the cutoff up to about 400 Hz, removing rumble and handling noise.
Remove hum (60 / 120 Hz) - a pair of narrow notch filters at 60 Hz and 120 Hz, for removing mains hum from recordings.

Noise gate

A noise gate mutes the track when the audio is below a threshold, which removes steady background hiss between sentences.

Enable noise gate - turns the gate on.
Threshold - audio below this level is gated down. -50 dB is a common starting point.
Reduction - how much the gated signal is attenuated. -40 dB is almost silent.
Attack - how fast the gate opens when audio rises above the threshold. 0.005 s is fast and natural for speech.
Release - how fast the gate closes when audio falls below the threshold. 0.15 s is a good default for speech; longer values cause a fade-out effect.

Equalizer

Four bands, each -12 dB to +12 dB:

Low - a low-shelf at 200 Hz. Boosts or cuts the body of a voice.
Mid - a peaking filter at 1.5 kHz with Q = 1. Controls the nasal quality of a voice.
High - a high-shelf at 6 kHz. Controls the air and brightness.
Presence - a peaking filter at 3 kHz with Q = 1. Brings a voice forward in the mix.

Dynamics

A single checkbox, Compressor. When enabled, the track is fed through a dynamics compressor tuned for voice: about 12:1 ratio, -24 dB threshold. This keeps the level consistent without needing manual gain riding.

Auto-ducking

Ducking automatically lowers a music track whenever a voice is playing on another track. To use it:

On the voice track, click the microphone button on the track head to mark it as a voice track.
On the music track, open the audio effects dialog and check Lower this track when voice plays.
Set the ducking amount (how much to lower), and the attack and release times.

The result is a hands-off music bed that gets out of the way of dialogue. A small DUCK badge appears on the track lane whenever ducking is active.

Loudness normalization

Loudness normalization measures the integrated loudness of your project and adjusts the master gain to hit a target level. This is the correct way to make sure your export plays back at a consistent volume on YouTube, Spotify, or broadcast.

Open File → Normalize loudness. Evidor decodes every audio clip on the timeline, applies K-weighting per the ITU-R BS.1770 standard, and computes the integrated LUFS over the whole project.

Pick a target from the dropdown:

YouTube and Spotify - -14 LUFS
Apple Music and Podcast - -16 LUFS
EBU R128 - -23 LUFS
ATSC A/85 - -24 LUFS

The measured loudness, the target, and the required offset in dB are all shown. Click Apply to set the master gain offset. This is a non-destructive change; the source clips are not modified.

Dialogue match

File → Match dialogue levels looks at every selected audio clip, computes the average of their peak levels, and adjusts each clip's volume so they all end up at that shared average. Use it when two takes of the same speaker were recorded at different levels.

Select two or more audio clips before running the command. The match works on peaks, not on integrated loudness, so it is a quick level alignment rather than a true loudness match.

Normalize all audio

File → Normalize all audio runs the per-clip normalize on every unlocked audio clip in the project. Every clip ends up peaking at about -1 dB. This is a blunt tool but useful as a starting point before the mixer.