workaround location to enable track meter (in case track meter is not default e.g. disabled in the audio track settings)

@bitman

I can confirm your finding. The ducking does not work unless you have the meters enabled.

I also have made the following observations::

If you set the Floor reduction to -96 decibels, the peak reduction becomes virtually inactive. There is no change if its zero, 100 or in-between because the Floor reduction reduced the sound so low you wouldn't hear any further sound reductions by the Peak reduction.

Floor reduction is in decibels and essentially sets a floor; reduces the listener track by a specific decibel level. So, if you set the floor to say -6 decibels but keep the Peak reduction at zero then you end up with a "square" profile for a Listening sound track.

This is similar to other editors, but while Vegas applies the floor across the entire Listening element, other editors only duck by the specified dB when the Control track has sound and "unducks" where there is silence (even within an element). 

If peak reduction is added, this increases the ducking even more based on the sound and silence of the Control track which produces these visible variable Nodes on the Control waveform.

To create a similar duck as other editors, one would keep the Floor at zero and "guestimate" the percentage reduction of the Peak reduction. The problem is, Peak reduction is too sensitive and produces too many Nodes. I suggest that there should be another slider for "Node sensitivity" so one can adjust the number of Nodes created by the system by averaging the peaks over time.

I would also suggest that Peak reduction have the option of Percentage or dB change as a preference setting. The dB would add a further variable reduction to the Floor reduction setting. Eg; Floor = -6 dBs and Peak = -4 dBs for a maximum of -10 dBs depending on the sound variability of the Control element. So during silence within a Control element, the dB is reduced by -6 In the Listening element. But if the Control element has sound, the Listening element is reduced to -10 during the period of the sound.

Also, my personal preference is to have a text box or drop down box where I can key in or select a number rather than a slider unless someone can tell me how to move the sliders with keystrokes rather than using the mouse.
  

@bitman

Why didn't you sign up for the new Beta Tester audition? You are really good!

You can break down new functions into their components and always find a problem with each new function. That's great. As a beta tester, you would significantly shorten the wait for more and more updates. How is it possible that every new feature doesn't work properly?

E.g.

The beat detector is definitely still broken that it cannot correctly estimate Bpm speed. The explorer needed two updates. And now the errors in Auto ducks. I also remember the introduction of the Freeze video function with just one click. She had a mistake too. Couldn't freeze the video when the playhead was at the beginning of the video. We had to wait another month for the repair. etc.

The team's strategy of releasing unfinished and bugs inovations and waiting for user reactions to include their comments in future updates is unfortunate. And it slows down terribly.

@pierre-k @bitman,

How is it possible that every new feature doesn't work properly?

We have to be careful in determining what is a bug and what is by design. It may be the case that track meters must be enabled for ducking to work. Perhaps, the fix is automatically enabling them when auto ducking.

I took a closer look at auto ducking and it appears to be working as designed although too well for my personal liking. For example, the following zoomed screenshot has the floor set to zero dB and the Peak set to 100%. The ducking follows these two conditions pretty well:

When the Floor is -3.10 and the Peak is 100% you can see how the Floor is established along the top of the waveform:

Likewise, if the Floor is set to zero and the Peak is 50%, the ducking result is as expected and by design.

My issue is that the ducking is a bit too sensitive (for me) and I would rather have the ducking less sensitive, hence the suggestion of a third slider called "Node Sensitivity." The result would look something as follows:

Perhaps a Beta tester reading this post can inform the development team of @bitman's track meter finding as well as the Node Sensitivity slider suggestion.🙂

Cheers!

Kind of odd, but I found a way to get auto-ducking to put an envelope on a background music track without meters being displayed. I changed a default internal setting for peak waveforms: Build 8-bit Peak Files from FALSE to TRUE. Leaving it FALSE built the control envelope on the vocal track as designed but created the envelope on the selected background music across the bottom of the track with no points. And if I edited a point on the vocal envelope, nothing happened on the background envelope. But I could select all the points on the vocal envelope and copy/paste them to the background envelope. I suppose that's another workaround.

@Howard-Vigorita good find, albeit a bit of complicated workaround, and messing with the internal settings is risky, they can be lifesaver, but personally I try to avoid changing them, and when I do change them for experimenting, I always put them back default asap, I am just to afraid I would forget to put them back later on when they may be haunting you in some untested, unexplainable behavior.

But your find could additionally help the developers in fixing this bug. At least if they read this forum from time to time, that is (and I get the impression they do)...

... But your find could additionally help the developers in fixing this bug. At least if they read this forum from time to time, that is (and I get the impression they do)...

@bitman I've been having trouble with needless peak rebuilding by vp22 whenever I need to open older projects. Exploring how to avoid those lengthy delays is how I stumbled across the auto-ducking interaction. Makes me wonder if peak-file graphics data is driving the control envelope. Good thing it doesn't drive the meters.

@Howard-Vigorita

Kind of odd, but I found a way to get auto-ducking to put an envelope on a background music track without meters being displayed. 

I have not experienced this issue with my testing. I can generate a listening envelope with or without the meters enabled. The issue is, if the meters are disabled, playing the timeline, the listening ducking envelop is ignored (doesn't duck or reduce the music).

I changed a default internal setting for peak waveforms: Build 8-bit Peak Files from FALSE to TRUE.

I tested this but it did not resolve the issue on my system. I still needed to enable the meters for the ducking to work properly.

Leaving it FALSE built the control envelope on the vocal track as designed but created the envelope on the selected background music across the bottom of the track with no points. And if I edited a point on the vocal envelope, nothing happened on the background envelope.

 If you set the Control ducking parameters as specified by @bitman (floor -96, peak 0), this is what you will get on the listening envelop by design. Editing a point on the vocal envelope moves the background envelope in all cases in my testing.

. But I could select all the points on the vocal envelope and copy/paste them to the background envelope. I suppose that's another workaround.

I am new to Vegas Pro so I'm not familiar how to do this. Perhaps you could point me to a tutorial or something. 🙂

I've been having trouble with needless peak rebuilding by vp22 whenever I need to open older projects. Exploring how to avoid those lengthy delays is how I stumbled across the auto-ducking interaction. Makes me wonder if peak-file graphics data is driving the control envelope. Good thing it doesn't drive the meters.

Howard this may be the reason why I'm not experiencing the issues you are encountering. My ducking test project was created in Vegas Pro 22 and I'm not importing older projects. So this is something to further investigate.

@Candive Sorry, I think I made a mistake when I posted yesterday... I actually copied the vocal auto-duck control envelope and inadvertently pasted it to a volume envelope on the background music track to make it work. In retrospect, this might actually work better all the time because it can be further tweaked on the track whose volume is being affected.

Copying envelopes is done with the envelope tool... select the track, click on the auto-duck control envelope and drag to light up all the points, crtl-c, then go to the other music track, click on the volume envelope so it's selected, make sure it's at the beginning, then ctrl-v to paste. You can do this to the volume envelopes of every track you want affected instead of using the auto-duck dropdown. In the alternative, some audio fx envelopes, like for compressor input or output gain, will also control volume if you're already using volume envelopes and don't want to overwrite them... fx envelopes are created in the audio fx chain.