[ardour-users] Editing interview done with two recorders.

[Paul Winkler]

On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 10:54:08PM +0200, Alex Polite wrote:
> It's not that noisy. It's just that the person speaking will sound
> closer when heard only through "her" track. If both tracks are unmuted
> the person will sound more distant.

You could do it with automation as others have suggested, but
that could be tedious.  The classic way to do this kind of thing
is with a pair of "duckers" - that is, compressors with a side-chain.
SC2 might do.

The general idea is that you'd hook up the first one like so:

    TRACK 1      TRACK 2
       |           | 
       v           v
  + ---o-----------o-----+
  |   input   sidechain  | 
  |                      |
  |     COMPRESSOR       | 
  |                      |
  |  output              |
  + ---o-----------------+ 
       |
       v
     new track input, or wherever you want to send the signal


... and hook up the second one with the inputs reversed.

Crank the compression ratio, set makeup gain at zero,
and set the threshold pretty low.  Now when there's signal on
track 2, the gain on track 1 is drastically reduced. Adjust the
threshold as needed.

Unfortunately, Ardour doesn't support wiring things like this :-(
You might be able to do it by feeding the signal through with an
external jack app with more flexible routing.
In fact, I'll go see if I can figure this out...

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com