Audio Compressor Filter

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Can someone please explain all the settings in the audio compressor filter

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Compressors are a standard tool among audio programs. Maybe this article from Audacity would be helpful for you:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/compressor.html

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Hi, I find the built in compressor difficult too.

It’s a compressor and the tools are pretty standard. However, probably like lots of people I’m used to visual audio tools with my compressors.

My process is longwinded but it works for me, picture lock. I do the visual part of the video in Shotcut with audio. Then export as many audio tracks as needed separately like stems. Import the audio and video into Ardour using the tools, Harvid and XJadeo. It’s a very comprehensive toolset. The DAW becomes an audio video editor with a video editing window but with an emphasis of a DAW.

Collate the finished audio and bare video track using ffmpeg to create the finished audio / visual.

I’m on Linux so it might be different for Windows. Anyway it works really well.

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Taking this opportunity, as an experienced musician, I want to thank the developers for a very convenient and well-functioning compressor in the shotcut program. I advise you to spend a little time and understand all of you in his work. It helps me a lot when I need to equalize the volume of several videos and it is simply indispensable when working with voiceover. I see no reason for me to describe its operation here, since in the filter itself there is a link to an article on Wikipedia, which explains the principle of the compressor.

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Thank you guys for the suggestions coming in. Here’s the original problem stated more completely. The video has some sections that are very very loud and other sections that are very quiet. Hence, a compressor filter is definitely needed. Along the lines of brians idea, I detached the audio and applied the compressor filter in Audacity, put the audio back in and exported as mp4 in Shotcut. Then I found out a random audio/video out of sync problem had somehow crept in. The out of sync error has not happened yet no matter how many times I have tried applying the compressor filter in Shotcut itself which is why I am requesting an expert of the settings. Sorry about this long post.

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The “Compressor” filter works well for smoothing out short audio peaks.

You might also want to look into the audio “Normalize” filters which are better at adjusting the overall audio loudness.

This video tutorial demonstrates how to use both of those filters:

You can put the Normalize and Compressor filters on a single clip, a track, or the main output depending on your needs/preference.

For my personal workflow, I use three filters:

  1. First, I apply the gain filter to each clip get the clip within 5dB of my target loudness.
  2. Then I apply the “one pass normalize” filter to the track
  3. Then I apply the compressor filter to the track to smooth any peaks
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