Audio tracks changing eachother's volume

Basically I’ve got some overlapping av tracks. The overlap is not complete, so in track 1 I have a clip which has my main theme in it, say it’s 3 minutes long. Could be a scene at a beach for example with the sound of the ocean waves. In track 2 I add another clip, this one is only 10 seconds long and could be something like an inspirational quote read out.

When the quote clip starts to play the volume of the base track changes significantly. It’s as though I’ve added a gain/volume filter to the beach track and suddenly the ocean is not a pleasant background noise but your ear is in the ocean as the quote is read.

What’s interesting is that I added a “color generator” to change the background color in some areas where I’ve adjusted opacity or have a cross fade that I don’t want to go down to black or white. Even though there is no audio in these generators, they affect the audio of the track as well in the same way. Any ideas on how to fix this without requiring me to add a gain/volume filter to every clip in my project? I already have over 400 clips in my tracks and plan on adding more. If I were to need to split at every overlap it would make this project a living nightmare.

What is your version and with what version did you start the project? Your problem sounds like problems with versions older than v16.12:
https://www.shotcut.org/blog/new-release-1612/

17.10.02

I’m new to shotcut and have only been using the program for about a month or so.

I cannot reproduce the problem you describe. I added 3 video tracks to the Timeline.
On V1, I added a color generator for a few seconds off and on a couple of times.
Next, I chose File > Open Other > Noise and added a Gain filter set to -10. I added this to the Playlist giving with a duration of 10 seconds. Then, I could drag this noise generator from the Playlist to V2.
Next, I added a couple shots a few seconds each from Microsoft’s Wildlife example video to V3.
I am both listening and using View > Scopes > Audio Waveform.
The white noise stays at a nicely consistent, medium level the whole time.

It sounds like you might have an audio filter applied somewhere you do not expect. With the Filters panel, select each track head by clicking it and see if any filters appear. Do the same for the empty block just above the track heads at the top, left of the Timeline (but below its toolbar).

Heyo, nailed it!

So i’d already gone through the track heads, I’d even tried looking into the XML to find an orphaned filter if I could,though the project is quite large so that wasn’t working out.

Turns out it was an audio filter in the timeline.

Do the same for the empty block just above the track heads at the top, left of the Timeline (but below its toolbar).

I had no idea this area even existed. The filter was a fade out audio filter. somehow that was making everything behave oddly. Thanks a ton!

I could have made a link to this forum post in the blog post for new v17.11 :smile:

Hi, this seems like a cornerstone Shotcut release. Thank you for your excellent work with Shotcut. :slight_smile: