Is there a Noise Gate in Audition?

[theCKWilliams]

if there is a noise gate in audition, i'm having trouble finding it. Anyone? Is it named something else that i'm just overlooking? Please help! i've got a project that needs finished within the next week and the tedium of putting "silence" between all of the vocal lines in the songs is killing me!

[Harvey Gerst]

Click on "Effects", then click on "Amplitude and Compression", then click on "Dynamics Processing"; go up to the preset options and you'll find it there.

[RawDepth]

I've always had a little difficulty using a noise gate on vocals. It can quickly chop up the subtle nuances of the voice if you are not careful. That all-important breath noise tends to go away leaving an unnatural sound.

As long as the track is not too ugly with lip smacking and such I would leave it alone. On the other hand, when you compress that noise gets exaggerated. Two words, I guess...happy medium. If you can set the gate to close slowly and go easy on it you can probably get away with it.

[Runaway]

I agree with RawDepth. Vocals deserve their own detailed attention, thats why I go through vocal lines by hand doing things like lowering or deleting breaths, eliminating clicks etc. Also applying manual Pitch Correction - see video.
http://www.aatranslator.com.au/training.html

[theCKWilliams]

its mainly between the parts where there is 2 or 5 seconds of silence. i live on a VERY busy street so there is always a bit of low noise from my whole house shaking but it's not so noticeable during the actual singing. i do thank you for the suggestions. i will take more care in a more serious project. this is for a funny semi-parody rap song. it's going on the internet and a very limited amount of cd's. again, i do appreciate the advice.

[oretez]

While the 'gate' function of the dynamics process can be used with a good deal or precision it is not going to be able to tell the difference between -25 dB of natural reverb tail that enhances the performance and -25 dB of street noise.

Additionally, particularly when applied to track as a whole, you have problem of release . . . setting release @ 3 sec. would continue to gate the next wanted phrase (in a 2 sec gap) setting release @ 2 sec. would leave a sec. of noise that partially because it now 'pops' becomes even more noticable (psychoacoustically speaking)

You can drop way down into the noise floor (< -35 dB) get a little improvement and impacted wanted audio only marginally . . . and specific numbers would depend on specific content. Or no matter how tedious bite the bullet and do it manually . . . you could also try the 'Auto Marking' to identify areas of silence (under Edit menu). Personally, except in the simplest of situations I have never found Auto Mark to not require some manual adjustment (here comes the tedium again) and as AA does not support noncontiguous selection you still could not apply a gate to entire range of selections . . . but once you've identified the silence using amplitude process to cut one and [F3] on each successive section runs fairly quickly. In AA3 I have not yet explored slightly more out of the box approaches where you batch out the selections from the markers list (essentially some form of noncontiguous selection) and accomplishing this

You also might see if Adaptive noise reduction . . . you might also with traditional noise reduction process see if 'keep just the noise' function then inverse paste into original file helps (trying on samples smaller then complete file speeds up auditioning process)

good luck

[theCKWilliams]

thanks again for even MORE useful info! the noise i'm looking to kill runs around and under -40db. i realize it's not much of a floor level of noise but i can hear it loud and clear at loud volumes, which most rap is played, and so i'm just looking to clean it up a bit more. once again, i do appreciate the input! i'll probably play around with some of your other suggestions for other projects that aren't on such a deadline and for other people. i do record my own stuff and i usually experiment a lot when recording my own material. sometimes the simplest change in mic placement or editing/fx can really change the sound of my songs. keep'em coming!

[theCKWilliams]

Originally Posted by RawDepth

I've always had a little difficulty using a noise gate on vocals. It can quickly chop up the subtle nuances of the voice if you are not careful. That all-important breath noise tends to go away leaving an unnatural sound.

As long as the track is not too ugly with lip smacking and such I would leave it alone. On the other hand, when you compress that noise gets exaggerated. Two words, I guess...happy medium. If you can set the gate to close slowly and go easy on it you can probably get away with it.

you were very very right. using the gate on vocals kind of sucked since it DID catch the end of a few phrases so i had to set the gate a little higher and still do a good amount of manual mute and fades but all in all, happy medium is where it's at!

thanks again to everyone for helping out with this!