The one place we do normally make an edit is at the start of the Hot Hardware section, as it can often take a few moments for the hardware in question to be brought out – plus, of course, people sometimes people need a minute to swap seats, if the person presenting the hardware hasn’t been involved in the news discussion.
#Apps like levelator full#
But for the most part what goes up is the full conversation, complete with misspoken words and bizarre tangents. We don’t do a great deal of editing either: if somebody sneezes or stumbles over a phrase, I might edit that out, because it’s just distracting.
We don’t use any other compression or normalising plugins, though: later on we’ll simply run the whole mix through the excellent Levelator tool, which does a very satisfactory job of automatically evening out everyone’s volume levels. I use a limiter on the whole mix just to ensure the signal doesn’t clip if (for example) two people laugh loudly at once. (This isn’t actually something the Studio One Gate plugin supports natively, so I achieve it by making a second copy of each track, applying a -500ms time offset and using this as a sidechain input for the gate.) To avoid clipping off the very starts of words, I give the gate a half-second lookahead. Each microphone track has a noise gate plugin applied, to minimise background noise and crosstalk.