Audio editing

[DaneClark]

Are there any tips to improving something that was edited in a way that causes noticeable jumps in background music? I don't have the original sources and the only programs I really know how to use are virtualdub and audacity.

[aedipuss]

you could add fade-in and fade-outs to the audio track wherever you want with audacity.

[JVRaines]

Audio only or audio-with-video? Are there foreground elements on top of the bad transitions? Is the music track separate or mixed?

[DaneClark]

I'm working with something where someone tried to two scenes that had completely different background music playing and tried to make it look like one big long scene. There is a sudden jump from one piece of background music to another and it still sounds kind of distracting

[hech54]

Well you can't remove "background music" from any file.......so what is it you were expecting for a result?

[DaneClark]

I guess that what I want to do is insert some kind of sound effect could somehow make any sudden jump from one piece of music to another where the middle of one piece of music suddenly cuts to the middle of another piece of music sound good. Probably a sound effect that sounds like a musical instrument anyway, like a cymbal crash or something

[JVRaines]

I wouldn't punctuate the shots with percussion because then they would come across as separate takes. There's a chance that you can tone down the music with vocal isolation and then add different music or background ambience.

[Cornucopia]

Even a simple x-fade transition of bkgd music @ low volume to bkgd music @ high volume will be less noticeable than a jump cut.

Scott

[raffriff42]

Briefly cut away to something else - backstage, outside, whatever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutaway_(filmmaking)
https://www.videomaker.com/article/13850-the-art-of-the-cutaway

[bFooz]

You might try to find the mp3s of the exact recordings that played in the background and synchronize these mp3s to the background music. Then you can cut out the original audio where there is no speech and then play with fades of handles of the speech snippets.

[tugshank]

a no no to a lot of audio experts, but i'd apply some heavy compression to kill the transients so that everything is loud or pretty much the same level. ffmpeg's compand can do that with points set at -72/-72 -36/-9 -3/-3 24/-3. post compression, using a db histogram will show that most of your peaks will most likely be in the -3 to -9 range.