Audio ducking

Hello friends. I am new to shotcut and wanted to know if this software has audio ducking? I am trying to add a voice over on top of background music and I need to lower and raise the levels so that the narration could be heard without the music overpowering it. I know I can do it manually with keyframes, but since my project is over an hour long, it makes a titanic task. Is there a simpler way to do it? I’d appreciate all your help.
Thank you so much.
Daniel

Hello Daniel,
No, Shotcut does not have audio ducking. You could do this by isolating all the musical parts corresponding to the comments and on which you apply a gain / volume filter to lower the levels. But I fear that this is a tedious task.
What I recommend to you and once your project is finished, is to individually export your music track and your comment track and process them in Audacity which has the Duck function. Once processed, you export your wav mix which you place in your Shotcut project instead of the two original tracks. In this case, your audio will be perfectly synchronized.
Good luck.

Auto Duck process simple youtube video I found.

Thank you so much. I tried doing something like that for the main audio since keyframing only works on each clip seperately and All my audio got out of sync. It’s a great software, but unfortunately is limited in features that almost every other editing software has

The best procedure for this would be to make all your video edits, export a wav file, import it into audacity, make the required adjustments and then import that into shotcut. Doing it this way will keep your duration identical and keep things in sync. I’ve used this for things such as echo reduction prior to the addition of the noisegate filter natively in shotcut.

Thank you for your help. But I am new to all this. If I export the finished file as WAV, won’t that merge all the audio lines in one? The problem that I have is that my original video has audio, I am adding music to the background and I have narration. So I have 3 audio tracks that I need to adjust the levels to. I think I am biting more than I can chew!!! I need all the help that I can get.
Thank you again.
Daniel

Yes it would merge them, however you do have the ability to mute each audio track and do 3 seperate exports letting you bring them(in sync) into audacity togethere
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Thank you so much. I will do that now. So helpful. Thanks again

Dear friends. I just tried the auto duck with Audacity. Can someone please tell me how do I need to export the file so that I can put it in shotcut? Do I merge and generate in audacity? Will it be 2 audio tracks? Or one combined?
Thank you all for your help.

You can combine them or export them individually, either will work. Shotcut supports multiple audio tracks so it’s whichever works best for you. Typically I export an uncompressed WAV from audacity so i’m not throwing it through mp3(or aac) compression twice(once on export from audacity and again from shotcut)

Thank you So much D_S for your help. Thanks to people like you and this forum, my life has been blessed and I learned how to edit my videos the way I wanted to.
Thank you so much for your help!!!

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