Multi-Track Basics

Every chapter so far has worked with a single track of audio — cleaning it up, shaping its tone, evening out its dynamics. This chapter adds a second track: background music, layered underneath the narration that's now been cleaned, EQed, and compressed by everything that came before it.

Adding a Second Track: Background Music

Audacity supports multiple tracks stacked in the same project — narration on one track, background music on another, both playing back together. Importing a music track alongside an existing narration track is straightforward; the real skill in this chapter is what happens next, getting the two tracks to sit together properly rather than fighting each other.

Basic Mixing: Balancing Two Tracks Relative to Each Other

Mixing, at this basic level, means setting each track's own relative volume so the narration stays clearly understandable while the music still contributes atmosphere rather than disappearing entirely. As a rough starting point, background music typically needs to sit noticeably quieter than narration — several decibels down — since its job is supporting the voice, not competing with it.

Ducking: Automatically Lowering Music Under Speech

Ducking automatically lowers the music track's volume specifically during moments when narration is present, then lets it rise back up during pauses or once the narration ends — the same underlying concept Video Editing Fundamentals' own Chapter 7 described in Fairlight, applied here on a standalone, non-video-synced pair of tracks. Even a simple, manually-drawn volume envelope over the music track — turning it down under speech, back up in the gaps — accomplishes the same basic goal without needing an automated ducking tool.

Honest Scope: Where Audacity's Multitrack Stops and Fairlight's Begins

This is genuinely basic multitrack work — two tracks, a simple volume balance, straightforward ducking. Fairlight's own multitrack environment (Video Editing Fundamentals' own Chapter 7) handles far more: many simultaneous tracks, automation curves, and — critically — everything kept in sync against a moving video picture. Audacity was never built to compete with that depth, and this course doesn't pretend otherwise; standalone podcast and voiceover mixing is a genuinely smaller job than full video-synced audio post-production.

Hands-On Exercises